Vivienne Westwood unveils homeless chic at Milan Fashion Week
Some carried bedrolls. Another emerged from his cardboard box with a sleeping bag, slung it around his neck and quickly walked away.
Several hundred fashion experts burst into rapturous applause as the cameras flashed. Dame Vivienne Westwood was presenting a menswear show at Museo della Permanente, Milan, last night in which the models were supposed to look like rough-sleepers.
“Homeless chic?” said one magazine editor who preferred not to be named. “It is a little close to the bone. The clothes were fantastic, though.” The theme, said Westwood, had been the suggestion of her Austrian husband, Andreas Kronthaler, who was in turn inspired by a lawyer friend who works for a homelessness charity.
Speaking backstage after the show, she said: “He just decided to style it homeless.” The catwalk was carpeted with old cardboard boxes. The models’ hair was dishevelled and discoloured by something silvery. This, said Westwood, was to make the young men look “like they were sleeping rough and they’d got frost in their hair”.
It’s a radical theme, but one prefigured in the film Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s 2001 parody of fashion. In it, a character called Mugatu markets a new fragrance: “Let me show you Derelicte,” says Mugatu. “It is a fashion, a way of life inspired by the very homeless, the vagrants, the crack whores that make this wonderful city so unique.”
Last night the press release for Westwood’s menswear collection, for Milan Fashion Week, declared: “Perhaps the oddest of heroes to emerge this season, Vivienne Westwood found inspiration in the roving vagrant whose daily get-up is a battle gear for the harsh weather conditions … Quilted bombers and snug hoodies also work well in keeping the vagrant warm.”
Westwood conceded that she herself had no experience of being homeless. “The nearest I have come to it is going home and finding I don’t have my door key,” she said. “I mean, what a disaster that is, dying to get in your house and you can’t. And what if it wasn’t there any more?”
It was not the only delicate subject to be broached. One of Westwood’s models wore an orange boilersuit — a touch of Guantánamo chic, perhaps — and another wore a jumper as a pair of trousers by sticking his legs through the sleeves. It was an allusion to clothes recycling. She said: “I’m saying to people as well, buy less clothes. Only buy things when you really need them and really like them. Wear them and wear them.”
At the end of the show — part of Milan’s menswear fashion week — Westwood was wheeled out on a paramedic’s stretcher from which she received the audience’s applause.
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