MIUSE: ISSUE 1

Author: Kelly Washington
Page 81
As youth trends became increasingly difficult to
capture moving at the speed of light online, brands
responded with collaborations and campaigns that
were as clever as they were unexpected - catching the
hard-to-impress, newly sophisticated consumer’s eye.
The embodiment of this was Georgian designer Demna
Gvasalia’s large blue shopper bag, inspired by IKEA’s
Frakta bag, that featured in Balenciaga’s Spring/Summer
17 Menswear collection. Priced at £1,365 and made of
calf leather, the bag demanded the internet’s attention.
Known for his designs that are unapologetically in tune
with the zeitgeist, Gvasalia’s blue bag repurposed the
everyday and the mundane, playing to the 2010s postironic
online spirit. IKEA also benefited, responding with
an iconic move in guerrilla marketing, the furniture store
released an advert that read ‘how to identify an original
IKEA FRAKTA bag’ followed
by ‘SHAKE IT if it rustles, it’s
the real deal’ and ‘PRICE TAG
only $0.99’. Elsewhere, Gucci
teamed up with Highsnobiety (a
successful streetwear site with
a cult following) to produce a
lookbook promoting their graffitiinspired
Cruise 2017 collection.
Collaborating with snowboarder
Trevor Andrew, aka GucciGhost,
the luxury brand strived to engage
millennial consumers by blending
high fashion with streetwear
- undoubtedly the trend that
characterised the decade.
The rise in luxury streetwear collaborations in
menswear was no coincidence since streetwear
speaks to masculinity and strength - worn like armour
on the streets. As much as distinctions between high
and low culture were being broken down, streetwear
sites and brands did not shake their reputation.
As Highsnobiety’s founder David Fischer told The
Business of Fashion at the time, they were ‘still being
perceived as a niche website, but 500 impressions
a month is not niche’. Making the collaboration even
more effective - without its underground reputation,
Highsnobiety would not have had the desired effect
for Gucci. It was about playfully mixing and reshaping
cultures, styles and brands that both questioned
and repurposed the luxury garment as we know it.
Kim Jones at Louis Vuitton took this to the next
level for his Fall/Winter 2017 menswear collection.
A collaboration with Supreme sent models down
the runway sporting LV garments with Supreme
cross body bags, lanyards, briefcases; you name it.
“IF HIGH FASHION
IS MEANT TO SHOCK
AND HOLD A MIRROR
UP TO SOCIETY -
PERHAPS THIS
IS FASHION IN ITS
HIGHEST FORM.”
Louis Vuitton had released a collab with the original
‘hype brand’, characterised by long-awaited skatewear
drops online that sold out in minutes, sported by the
likes of underground provocateur Tyler the Creator
and the Odd Future clan. A purposeful nod to high/
low culture blending, Louis Vuitton’s collection
emphasised the hold that the internet had on fashion.
No surprise, it worked - the internet went wild.
Nothing came as close to post-ironic luxury fashion as
Gosha Rubchinskiy’s Spring/Summer 2018 Menswear
collaboration with Burberry. Burberry’s past emblazoned
on the check print, fraught with meaning that only
adds to its legacy - like a national flag. Historically,
the Burberry trench coat was the uniform of British
officers in the First World War, regarded as a token of
the aspirational middle class in Britain. The check was
iconic and popular. So popular -
that it fell victim to the ‘logomania’
of the 90s. Burberry (both fake
and real) was suddenly adopted
by the lower middle class and the
‘chavs’ in Britain. Football fans
in the UK and Eastern Europe
donned the print, known as the
‘Burberry Lads’. The brand was
synonymous with a chav-focused
moral panic that consumed British
media in the early noughties.
You could be barred from a pub
for wearing the check. When
that tabloid picture emerged
in 2002 of actress Danniella
Westbrook and her daughter
dressed head to toe in the pattern, the brand’s UK
sales plummeted. Enter Christopher Bailey to save
Burberry; by embracing and capitalising off the print’s
ubiquity, the company experienced a swift turnaround.
Paying homage to the UK’s influence on Russian football
combined with his love of electronic music, Rubchinskiy
sent football hooligan and rave-clad models down
the runway in St. Petersburg - and the chav-tastic
working-class youth in Britain were celebrated. An
emblem of British popular culture, once perceived
to be low culture, was repurposed on Rubchinskiy’s
runway; creating a high-low culture cocktail of street
style and 90s rave aesthetic that had a pervasive
influence on fashion and youth in the late 2010s.
The effect of social media on fashion during the
2010s decade was paramount. Urging luxury to be
playful, daring and bold; brands rewrote the rulebook
to appeal to a new internet-savvy generation. If high
fashion is meant to shock and hold a mirror up to
society - perhaps this is fashion in its highest form.