‘This was a store,’ offers Vogue, ‘where they literally rolled out the red carpet for celebrities who arrived ready to sort through piles of […] bedazzled T-shirts featuring their [own] faces.”¹ Theorist Jean Baudrillard, noting hyperreality’s tendency towards creating a ‘real without origins or reality,’² might as well have been speaking about this environment when he referred to our ever-increasing fascination with the obscene. For capitalism and idiot scandal, it couldn’t be bettered. Kitson was the party-girl incarnation of Nicole Ritchie, gaunt and pre-motherhood; it was Blonde Lindsay Lohan, and Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton’s Assistant, and Britney Spears with acne. Kitson was, most of all, mid-Noughties MTV, beaming out nobodies ‘getting real’ – a relic itself, of a time when TV had only just seized on the idea of faking real-life.

The New York Times, for its part, describes the closure of Kitson as breathlessly as if it were eulogising the Chelsea Hotel. ‘More than a place to pick up Juicy Couture tracksuits and Ugg boots,’ reporter Sheila Makirar explains, ‘Kitson provided a backdrop for celebrity melodrama: Ms. Spears trying on hats at 2 a.m. Ms. Hilton shopping with girlfriends, oblivious to her dog urinating on a display of studded ballet flats. Kim Kardashian, before she went West, browsing the boutique, fresh-faced in an empire-waist maxidress.’³ Once, ‘Ms. Spears’ also went shopping in Kitson with menstrual blood staining her thigh,⁴ though this passes unmentioned; perhaps because, as far as mythologies go, it’s violent rather than melodramatic. Kitson, quite often, was both: a stage-setting for weird tableaux, peopled by seemingly-unhinged celebrity socialites. Surfing its mid-Noughties girl-wave, you had to get raw or be drowned.

It’s strange now, in hindsight, to think about all the world’s girls in their Juicy­-brand tracksuits amid the Clenbuterol boom, when ideal bodies were meant to be radically, hungrily skeletal, i.e. un-juicy: wearing garments labeled with zeroes but shaped nothing like them. Ones, instead, were the bodily trend: lines of straight little ones and elevens, as narrow as Adderall rails, were mobbing Kitson in frenzies at weekends. All over L.A.’s sidewalks, there were girls pulling rank in their pastel-pink two-pieces; girls with Swarovski Razrs; girls with loose, pale hair extensions and plastic French tips. The pre-GRC economy hadn’t yet tanked and so class felt superfluous as a pretense. ‘Los Angeles’ turned into ‘elsewhere.’ Then, ‘Los Angeles’ turned into ‘everywhere’ – or, to be accurate, everywhere Westernised on earth became a Los Angeles outpost, and the dogged pursuit of fame that exists in L.A. became something not local, but global, so that all of us found ourselves stepping wide-eyed off the bus in perpetua, dressing for anonymity in expensive leisurewear even with no paparazzi to hide from.

Aspirational brands beget tribes, but Kitson’s following differed from most in the way that it prized a point lower than pinnacle, seeking instead a new power that fed on imperfect girl archetypes. Kitson women were ones who flaunted their alcoholism, their air-headedness and their sexual dysfunction. Within their aesthetic, new-money’s excess sensibility fused with the kitsch preoccupations of mallrat teenhood. T-shirt slogans like ‘I LOVE SHOES AND BAGS AND BOYS’ appeared beside ones that screamed, unselfconsciously, ‘XANAX’ or ‘VICODIN.’⁵ There were sloppy pronouncements like ‘THIS IS MY LAST CLEAN T-SHIRT.’ There were slogans about celebrities, worn by other, lower-grade celebrities, tracing out mirror-recursions of fame and non-fame and half-fame in their casual paparazzi pictures.

The popular mantra of ‘never-too-rich-or-too-thin’ still persisted, but now we agreed that a girl could be messy as long as she made enough money, or owned enough shoes. Dysfunctional socialites, unsurprisingly, proved to be dysfunctional consumers; for the first time, the people we wanted to be like were the people we were like, only richer. Bona fide ‘hot messes,’ they drank the same hyper-coloured vodka shots from their girlfriends’ navels; suffered the same anxieties, shared the same addictions and shortcomings, and called men ‘boys’ as a means of nullifying the terror of possibly dying alone. They blacked out. They crashed innumerable cars. They rarely excelled at anything, but the very fact of their aimlessness made them interesting to us because they validated our lazy ennui.

Some of them, of course, eventually grew up and streamlined their public identities so that their flaws were less prominent. As in Susan Sontag’s definition of camp, Kim Kardashian has since become ‘art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is “too much,”’⁶ and so the kittenish garment sloganeering of Kitson no longer suits her purposes, either as icon or object. Worn in public, statements defy others’ need to project their own values on popular figures, and Kardashian – ever the capitalist – knows this, though she has occasionally played the billboard for her now ex-husband, Kanye West. Britney Spears, in wearing ‘I’M A VIRGIN (BUT THIS IS AN OLD SHIRT)’ and, later, ‘I AM THE AMERICAN DREAM,’ wrote her pre-breakdown memoirs in two lines. There is a famous image of Lindsay Lohan shopping in Kitson, wearing a T-shirt that says ‘SKINNY BITCH’ in lettering made from twigs; its tone – confrontational, smugly flawed, and delivered hot on the heels of an anorexia scandal – is pure Kitsonese, regardless of whether she actually bought it there.

For Kitson’s celebrity girl-gang, the ethos of Barbara Kruger’s ‘I SHOP THEREFORE I AM’ merged with the grimiest texts by Jenny Holzer (‘DISASTER DRAWS PEOPLE LIKE FLIES,’ or ‘WHEN YOU BECOME RICH, DEATH SNIFFS THE AIR AND STARTS CIRCLING’) so that, in playing with medium-and-message, they conjured Umberto Eco: ‘where is the mass medium? Is it […] the polo shirt? And at this point who is sending the message? The manufacturer of the polo shirt? Its wearer? […] Because it’s a question of ideology.’⁷ There, on L.A.’s Robertson Boulevard, wearer and manufacturer had reached – albeit temporarily – an ideological understanding, promoting their own hypothetical slogan, I AM THE IMPERFECT IDEAL. In a Los Angeles Magazine profile of Kitson, back in 2005, the magazine made the decision to lead not with pap-shots or portraits, but with a falsified digital image; one just as redolent of the American dream as a Richard Prince Girlfriend, but even more cheap, and less deep. The picture was of Lindsay, smiling coquettishly, being arrested for crashing her car by the shop-front. ‘IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE HEAT,’ screamed the headline, ‘GET OUT OF THE KITSON.’

Philippa Snow is a Norwich-based freelance writer.

1. http://www.vogue.com/13390437/kitson-closing-paris-hilton-victoria-beckham-britney-spears/ ↩

2. J. Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulation, Michigan University Press, 1981. ↩

3. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/fashion/kitson-where-kim-kardashian-and-britney-spears-shopped-sees-the-end.html?_r=0 ↩

4. http://jezebel.com/346256/doth-not-a-mentally-ill-popstar-bleed ↩

5. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/29/kitson-lawsuit-xanax-vicodin-adderall_n_3837291.html ↩

6. S. Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp,”’ The Paris Review, 1964. ↩

7. U. Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality, Harcourt Publishers Ltd., 1990. ↩

‘Ugliness is the devil’s grin behind beauty’

– Victor Hugo

AGAINST AN OVER-SATURATION OF images and information, our aesthetic judgments are complicated by the coexistence of ‘beauty’ and ‘ugliness’ within contemporary fashion. At this intersection emerges ‘good-bad’ taste, identified here as an eclectic montage of formal qualities¹ that evoke past and traditional imagery otherwise rejected as faux pas – fashion ‘don’ts’ – revived in the present and celebrated as beautiful. A friend of mine recently stated that she doesn’t wear clothing that evokes good-bad taste because she isn’t attractive enough, a perception that uncovers the dependence of this popular luxury aesthetic on active references to universal beauty. This good-bad taste is used as design pastiche for fashion designers like John Galliano, Miuccia Prada and Walter Van Beirendonck, all of whom are heavily indebted to the spectacle of fashion in visual culture. This simultaneously dethrones, and reinforces the power of idealised beauty in contemporary taste.

Determining what is beautiful or ugly in contemporary fashion has become highly problematic. Classicism solidified an ideal ‘immortalised’ beauty that is aesthetically appealing, synonymous with virtue, completeness and integrity. Ugliness is the antithesis of this sensibility, and is as a result seen as shameful, incorrect and disorderly.² Religious and cultural change pioneered that imperfection could contribute to the agreeability of the whole, where ugliness is redeemed by context to contribute to ‘the harmony of the universe’.³ Consequently, the avant-garde provocation of good taste produced ugly portrayals of reality,⁴ destabilising ugliness as ‘other’. Late twentieth-century representations of classical beauty in mass culture have trivialised the former for commercial ends. Here emerges fashion’s Post-Modern tendency to reflex between past themes, celebrating imagery it once rejected. Good-bad taste crystallises this revival where the serious is made frivolous to become an enjoyment of artificial legitimacy and a celebration of ugliness – ‘it’s beautiful because it’s horrible’.⁵

‘Ugly chic’ is a term that might easily describe John Galliano’s cultural pastiche of luxury and commerciality. His autumn/winter 2001 collection for Christian Dior displays a tongue-in-cheek irreverence toward Western canons of cultural integrity. A montage of ‘white-trash’ streetwear, mass fashion culture, tacky amateurism and traditional elegance, it had model Erin Wasson styled as a neo-punk with multiple piercings, star stickers and hair extensions. Her look is a jumble of luxurious and cheap, with layered and raunchy proportions and candy colours vibrating against sombre beige. Good-bad taste is here presented in the context of historical luxury, in a display of degenerate faux pas and cultural simulacra.

Central to Miuccia Prada’s aesthetic is the perversion of feminine clichés. Her 2011 autumn/winter collection promotes a sly mockery of traditional glamour and male gaze-oriented sex appeal by celebrating faux pas of feminine style. Model Ginta Lapina wears a boxy 1960s style coat of fantastically tacky fake fur, in which proportion is obeyed but ridiculed through emphasis on feminine details such as the drop-waist. The fresh-faced, deadpan models allude to youthful innocence and earnestness, but their outfits are always just warped enough to hint at something unsightly brewing under the surface. The lookbook for the collection, titled ‘Fantasy’, features cutouts of 1960s domestic iconography, collaged scrapbook-style alongside the current photos of the models. This configures feminine ugliness as a pleasure in self-possession:⁸ rather than performing an obvious thematic collage, Prada’s ambiguous imagery fictionalises bad taste. That the designer is not overtly playful with this aesthetic has a mystifying effect and Prada’s signature ‘ugly cool’ prevails. While cerebral and obscure, the appeal of Prada’s ugly chic depends on the presence of bourgeois beauty ideals that are simultaneously obeyed and perverted.

For designer Walter Van Beirendonck, the visual labyrinth of celebrated ugliness is inextricable from commodity culture. His designs provoke by their usage of well-established iconography and cultural motifs, re-presenting beauty and ugliness in a critical way. Good-bad taste is a new aesthetic generated from a relay between imagery: the fragmenting, juxtaposing, exaggerating and falsifying of iconography reveals a kind of integrity. What emerges is an aestheticisation of ugliness that destabilises the coherent trajectory of traditional ideals. Good-bad taste as a signifier of cultivation and knowing becomes branded and part of fashion’s ‘civilising process’,¹⁰ stylised as elite, appealing and aspirational. In Van Beirendonck’s work this sensibility is positioned as covetable for its deviation, juxtapositioned and dependent as it is on the presence of the traditional, classic beauty of the work of his more conventional peers. Through strategic branding and the exclusiveness and reputation of the Van Beirendonck brand, the house has developed an integrity that ‘authorises’ ugliness and makes it desirable to its consumer. Despite its allusions to a radical, artistic provocation, this take on ugly chic is indebted to the conventions of mainstream luxury fashion.

Through a calculated presentation of bad taste, fashion faux pas are redeemed by luxury fashion. The aesthetic of ugly chic has at once uncovered and complicated the maneuvers of power that operate in the dynamic between beauty and ugliness. As for my friend, pairing a Prada bag with an outfit of good-bad taste is sure to inspire any confidence needed due to the lack of a fashionable body or the facial features of a Prada model.

Emily McGuire is a fashion writer and researcher from Brisbane, Australia.

1. Formal qualities implicate outward appearance dictated by convention, equilibrium. ↩

2. This perception is sometimes cited as a neoclassical stereotype of the classical world (Eco, U. 2007. p. 22). ↩

3. Eco, U. 2007. Introduction in On Ugliness.  p.16.  New York: Rizzoli International Publications ↩

4. Rather than “beautiful portrayals of ugly things” (Eco, U. 2007. p.365). ↩

5. Eco, U. 2007. The Ugliness of Others, Kitsch Camp in in On Ugliness.  p.417.  New York: Rizzoli International Publications. ↩

6. Source:  http://johngallianolesincroyables.tumblr.com/post/53313385331/john-galliano-for-christian-dior-fall-winter-2001. ↩

7. Source: http://thedailystylepage.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/prada-fantasy-lookbook-fall-2011.html ↩

8. Thurman, J. 2012. Radical Chic: A Critic at Large. p.1 The New Yorker. March 26. ↩

9. Source: http://blog.christibor.com/2010/01/22/walter-van-beirendonck-christibor-collaboration-bags/ ↩

10. The civilising process within fashion refers to “the suppression of aggressive and instinctual behaviour in favour of the development of a reflexive modelled and nuanced self” (Evans, C. 2009. p. 5). ↩