"Homeless Chic"

This article was mentioned on the Medved show the other day, and had me cracking up. Here's an excerpt, best read with a slightly effete yet deadly serious intonation—think NPR news announcer:

Some of us prefer to think of fashion as a charcoal filter that indiscriminately sucks up whatever’s swirling around, rather than a big ear that listens to what’s going on in the culture. Sometimes ideas become clarified in fashion, and sometimes they get stuck as gunk.

How else to account for a spate of references in fashion to homeless chic? A 28-page pictorial in the September issue of W magazine, shot by the British photographer Craig McDean, repurposes shopping bags from labels like Chanel and Dior as makeshift dresses, and shows them worn with furs and pearls and designer bags.

The Russian model Sasha Pivovarova, listless but still ineffably glamorous, is seen slumping on a park bench or a mattress or a bed of Prada bags. Along with the hair and makeup people involved in the story, the stylist Alex White is credited at the end of the spread for having made the (cleverly constructed, it must be said) paper-bag clothes.

I smell a reality show, pun intended. Oh... yeah, I forgot the best line:

It was just that the man’s jeans-shorts-over-sweat-pants look, his pale blue boots, with matching socks, gloves and glasses, suggested that he had not lost his need to “communicate and express himself through style.”

Wow, that is so deep. Give the guy some white make-up, big floppy shoes and a old bowler hat and he's a ready-made circus clown. I'm guessing he already has a red nose.