Surrealism is staging a fashion comeback.
One evening in April, I was deep down a rabbit hole browsing the Ssense website when something so strange happened to me that it made me question whether or not I was still in my right mind. The item in question was a pair of green knee-high boots; each boot had not a square toe or tonsil, but four bleached digits, resembling an alien foot. They were less “shoes” than “partially sentient creature that appears to have emerged from Shrek’s swamp”. As I tried to determine what kind of customer might buy these $1,650 boots, all my fused brain could muster was “scum fetishist” or “costume designer putting on a community theater production . Flubber.” (I later found an image of Tessa Thompson wearing a version of them in black with a metallic gold shredded minidress at a 2021 Met Gala after-party, but her indifference didn’t could convince me of the appeal.)
The boots are a twisted creation of Avavav, the Florence-based brand whose creative director, Beate Karlsson, is responsible for other absurd pieces such as a dress that appears to sprout goiters from her hips and a pair of silicone shorts designed to mimic. a photorealistic donkey, nicknamed “Bum”. The very existence of such clothing begs the question “Where do we draw the line between clothing and costume?”
People wear costumes to transform into someone else. They are pantomimes, used to escape actual circumstances. But the surprising outfits I’ve seen lately don’t seem to reflect a desire to place oneself within an alternate reality; rather, they seem to be a manifestation of who we are. As noted fashion critic Sarah Mower wrote in her review of Loewe’s Fall 2022 show, “In times when reality becomes wild and nonsensical, it’s only logical that fashion begins to reflect the illogical.” In a world where there are no rules and nothing matters, the only thing left is to dress like us.
The Avavav boot joins a number of other quirky items that, while they haven’t “taken over”, are certainly growing in popularity. The Fall 2022 runways were dominated by surrealist elements, such as Loewe’s balloon dresses and Moschino’s musical instrument ensembles. Even the eternally ladylike Dior embraced eccentricity with glow-in-the-dark piping sewn into bodysuits. The dominance of new style icons like Sara Camposarcone, a Hamilton, Ont.-based content creator whose style resembles what the holy love child of a clown and a fairy princess might wear, and Clara Perlmutter of The New Yorker, better known as @tinyewishgirl on TikTok, who looks like a Gen Z reincarnation of a 90s club kid, confirms that after a long absence, irony and weirdness are back.
Every day has been like Halloween for more than two years in a global pandemic in which the simple act of dressing up has become a celebration of life. Perhaps the dress has become so anarchic to compensate for the fact that living through one of the most terrifying events imaginable in human history has turned out to be less dystopian. Mad Max and more like Groundhog Day – just with more screen time.
“I gravitate toward color and brightness because they bring me joy,” says Shea Daspin, 32, an LA-based designer who describes her approach to clothing as similar to artist Marcel Duchamp’s popular technique, in which he created sculptures from a variety. of objects found. Daspin started dressing as Rainbow Brite on acid at the age of 13 after discovering a Japanese street style magazine. Fruits, which has been her style star of the North ever since. “I have so many different personalities within me, and it’s almost like I want to express them all at the same time,” she says. One day she can be dressed as a rich friend on Park Avenue, another day as a handler at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. But don’t call it a costume. “Just because something is over the top doesn’t mean it’s a costume,” she says.
Growing up, Daspin’s unconventional style marked her status as an outsider. But as the culture has become more open, even celebratory, to wild outfits, she now sees her outfits as a way to spread happiness to strangers. “It’s not a form of activism per se, but it’s hard to look at a bunch of glitter and not think, ‘That’s fun.’
The hunger for endless fiction can also be a side effect of experiencing the world primarily through screens. Boring outfits just don’t grab your attention when you’re endlessly scrolling through an app. It’s always the weirder the better, which is probably why TikTok trends like “clowncore” and “nightwear” are seemingly ephemeral, appearing and disappearing so quickly.
The prevailing appetite for absurd clothing is not only a result of the past, but also a vision of the future. Much is being made of the metaverse—a parallel virtual reality in which residents can dress up as avatars in a video game, wearing dresses covered in scorching flames, for example, or cloaked in a cloud of fog. In the metaverse, anyone can dress up like it’s the Met Gala, even if they’re at home in sweatpants.
Fashion—and culture in general—is in the midst of a massive reimagining of possibilities. Previous boundaries—such as not wearing a dress that’s on fire—no longer apply. Even if an item doesn’t initially make sense in real life, it can feel right at home in a digital archive where a person can still experience the play of dressing up without being subject to the constraints of the real world.
Maybe the nonsensical Avavav slime boots aren’t meant for me, not because they’re ridiculous or impractical, but because they’re not meant for the earthly realm at all.
This article first appeared on OF FASHION September issue. Find out more here.
