Here’s a thought: It’s some mundane Tuesday afternoon after a particularly dreadful class. Your mind is still buzzing from a particularly rambling lecture; you’re scrolling through TikTok or Instagram to escape the monotony when, all of a sudden, you see something that makes you stop what you’re doing and actually blink. Someone on your feed is proudly flaunting their latest luxury loot—an $800 pair of mud-splattered Acne Studios jeans, Balenciaga’s actual garbage bag purse, or clothing plucked from actual garbage cans because apparently “dumpster diving core” is a thing. Honestly? It makes you pause.
When Did Actual Hardship and Institutional Campaign Planning Become a Pinterest Aesthetic?
Just look at how society operates at the moment, and it is no surprise that the ultra-exclusive world of high fashion, not to mention the ridiculously rich celebrities, have made the ability to appear to be poverty-stricken into a billion-pound industry. We have seen the dwellers in opulent guarded homes blow 100K plus for whole ensembles, making them look as if they have worked in the fields the entire day. It’s not adding up.
Oh, and don’t forget: runway. Because in the world of luxury, even poverty has found itself in SNL-Esque territory. We saw Balenciaga make models stride down catwalks via literal hills of mud with bruised bodies hauling designer bags formed from inexpensive plastic carrier shopping bags. Does anyone recall that fabulous 2000 Christian Dior collection by John Galliano which introduced a “homeless chic” concept and sent models down the catwalk in printed newspaper silks (people use newspaper for warmth, do they not)? Or even Japanese label Daiki Obana coming up with an NY-inspired catwalk show, focusing on the homeless – even down to models looking sunbaked and disheveled, and the use of blankets for coats. Kanye was so brazen that he went one step further by designing an enormous, deconstructed jumper riddled with tears and holes, priced up to $2,600. Kanye himself stated he got inspiration for his design from homeless people.
But honestly, nothing really changes. Before the centuries of the aristocracy masquerading as ordinary Joe or Jo public, there were swathes of sumptuary laws telling people what they should and should not wear based on their status in medieval and Renaissance Europe – allowing the monarch the finest silk whilst their servants were obliged to wear plain, rougher wool. In time, the rich people figured out that they could design costumes too for this entire operation. During the depression, Coco Chanel popularized the “little black dress” and a trend she called “luxurious poverty”, and told her super-rich clients to dress dowdy like their maids – but just keep on flashing some diamonds. In French Revolution times, they donned the dress of the people for derision or identification – and in the nineties, impoverished, angst-ridden punk has been converted into upmarket “grunge” or “heroin chic”.
Yet, where those clothes truly become a bit of a joke is in the amount of privilege there is to that performance. Simple and challenging are the opposite of self-inflicted. The hope for thrift or vintage finds is a survival of the fittest for some, but for an influencer, it’s simply a pose – an Insta shoot wardrobe, shoved in the washing machine which uses some sort of science, then returned to paradise.
And so you see it on the micro level too. Take, for example, the reprocessing of working-class space and conduct. Every other thing that a working-class person or culture might do in the old days was so low-class.
Take ukay-ukay culture. When people who have less have no choice but to buy from the scraps of money on thrift piles-well, that’s just life. But in the eyes of upper middle-class college students or online resellers representing it as nothing but “sustainable vintage curation” (for profit, of course), that cheap chop suey becomes decontextualized, diced up, and resold as a fancy “hipster tasting menu” in a trendy SoHo, downtown neighborhood, pushing out real locals. Even how rich urbanites handle the provinces (digging up the beaches to “escape the city,” to “live simply,” pushing cities’ prices up and driving out their non-city inhabitants in the process)-even that can gentrify and displace real people.
It’s the classic gentrification playbook we have seen time and time again: take something from a working-class community, strip it of its original context, make it palatable for wealthy people, and sell it back at an astronomical price. Yet the rules completely change when it goes the other way around. Working-class people don’t get to participate in luxury or trends on their own terms; the goalpost always moves. If a regular student wears certain local or unpolished styles, they’re called tacky, but when an influencer does it, it’s high fashion.
When you peel back the artsy PR statements from creative directors claiming they are “raising awareness” or “celebrating resourcefulness,” there is a horrifying human and environmental cost to this trend.
Mass-producing brand-new denim just to chemically distress it, sandblast it, shred it, and smear it with fake mud takes an insane toll on the planet. A single pair of jeans requires roughly 1,800 gallons of water to produce. But worse than the environmental waste is the human cost. In countries like Bangladesh, Turkey, and China, factory workers spend hours every day inhaling toxic dust and chemicals, which leads to deadly lung conditions like silicosis, just to manufacture distressed clothes that will end up selling for thousands of dollars in Western boutiques. An 18-year-old working 11 hours a day in a choking garment factory for a mere $70 a month isn’t cosplaying poverty for an editorial spread: they are trying to survive.
And that’s the ultimate takeaway here. Real poverty and systemic hardship aren’t fun, edgy personality traits. They aren’t a weekend costume you can slip off before heading to a nice dinner or posting a recap on your Instagram story. Next time you see something like this on the runway, take a moment to think: is this really high fashion?
So maybe next time a billionaire designer tries to sell us a $2,000 trash bag or an influencer tries to romanticize “struggle-core,” we should call it what it is: tone-deaf performance art. True style doesn’t require mocking people who are just trying to get by, and poverty should never, ever be treated as a trend.