Derelicte - Homeless Chic

It can sometimes be difficult to really appreciate fashion without wondering if knowing that those exorbitant price tags could be put to much better use elsewhere. On the other hand, I think fashion is the closest thing to art without actually being art - interestingly enough, I read a lot of press last week about the brouhaha created by the latest biography of Yves Saint Laurent, written by a Frenchwoman called Marie-Dominique Leliévre. Expressing her reservations on the widely accepted view that Saint Laurent was an artist, she writes: "An artist recreates, reinvents the world, a couturier only dresses it."

I'm not sure how much I agree with her, since great fashion designers change the way the world looks at clothes and their wearers, which makes them creators and perhaps, using Madame Leliévre's definition, artists in their own right.

Regardless, there are times when the boundaries between art, fashion and sheer ludicrousness get a bit blurry, especially when it comes to quotidian outfits using everyday materials to make products that are more often than not factory produced in China. Gawker seems to share my views and has put together a visual of what one could purchase for $15,000 in the quest for homeless chic (a concept I would find hilarious if it weren't a sartorial reality).

What do you think? Is spending almost $3,000 for a threadbare, geeky, falling-apart-at-the-seams sweater fashion, art, or just a subversive statement?

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Rodarte Go Home - Rodarte Fall / Winter 2010

I've never been a big fan of Rodarte. I thought those threadbare cobweb sweaters were heinous to look at, the sisters have always come off in media interviews less like the quirky, eccentric, nonchalant designers they try so hard to be and more like annoying, nerdy kids, and blood and guts does less to describe the themes of their collections as it does my state of mind while looking at them.

It's a harsh thing to say, I know. Maybe Rodarte caters to this niche subversive ugly-is-pretty aesthetic that I'm just not cool enough to get, but I don't care. Their clothes are often just plain ugly and that's not fashion to me. Their most recent collection did little to appease my indignation for their so-called aesthetic, based as it was on a horrifyingly fugly interpretation of their hankering for their Mexican roots. Somehow a drive from El Paso to Marfa in Texas got them thinking about their homeland, and more particularly the hazy atmosphere in what I believe is a particularly drug-addled town called Juarez in Mexico, and from that they arrived at sleepwalking as a theme.

So we have old blankety-looking garments whose mustiness I feel like I can almost smell through my computer screen, chunky layers adorned by tassels galore, and that horribly lurexy quality to the sleeves and leggings that makes my skin itch by just looking at it.

I couldn't click through the entire collection - if I had, I might have seen some of the more passable stuff, like this:

But there was nothing inherently wearable about most of the collection - unless of course you're hoping for people to gaze at you sympathetically as they whisper to their companions about the state of public healthcare, and why oh why don't they provide better treatment for the crazies? - and I'm not saying that all fashion must always be wearable, god no - but there's no art to this. There's no real beauty in the clothes, nothing that makes the heart beat faster, or justifies their existence. There is no reason for these clothes to exist.

When considering their theme, one thing becomes apparent - the Mulleavy sisters may not have captured the ethereal dreaminess of the actual act of sleepwalking, but they have certainly put forth a collection that looks like it was made in their sleep.

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