kabustyleeさんのブログ
pre-dirtied trainers
Would you pay £280 for a pair of pre-dirtied trainers?
You might not pay £280 for pre-dirtied trainers, yet people are and Golden
Goose – the Italian brand behind these scuffed and muddied trainers – is making
a tidy living out of trainers that look like you’ve traipsed through an
alternative, dirtier life that is probably more fun and car-less than the
reality. Lifestyle appropriation, if you will.
Distressed fashion, a vulture on fashion’s horizon, is not a new practice but
it is problematic. Not simply because it mimics a lifestyle, or because it rules
out the important rite of passage that results in distressed clothes (getting
friends to muddy boxfresh trainers, looking down at that familiar cigarette burn
and remembering who burned you), but because they fetishise an alternative
lifestyle, one that’s often at odds with the price point. These are expensive
trainers that look like their wearer has never taken a cab, to be worn with
pre-faded jeans, that suggest your job is less office-based than it probably is,
your location less urban, and – worse – this is presumably the reasoning behind
these aesthetic tics.
There are, of course, acceptable exceptions – garment factories have been
using sandblasters to selectively strip dye from denim to create a unique colour
rather than a worn-down look (although sandblasting is a fairly dangerous
technique). Equally, in cinema, most recently in Spotlight, costume designers
create the pre-worn shirt look by placing a tennis ball in the wash which wears
down the fibres.
But then there are the pieces that spin absurd yarns about their wearer:
Japanese brand Zoo Jeans’ ripped denim suggests you once handled lions. The
Adidas’ 7X750 trainers, made in collaboration with artist Ryan Gander, implies
you believe in ‘handcrafted’ mud. Zoltar the Magnificent’s pre-burned tees
exposed you, an athlete, to actually be a 40-a-day man. In the late 90s, and
just as the property boom kicked off, if you wore Helmut Lang’s paint-splattered
jeans you led your friends to believe that you have had the money to buy a house
and a pair of expensive jeans, but that didn’t quite leave enough capital to get
it done up, too.
Alessandro Gallo and Francesca Rinaldo launched Golden Goose Deluxe Brand’s
footwear in 2007 to go alongside their streetwear. Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law and
Off-White founder Virgil Abloh all wear them, which, says Abloh, “makes them
unique”. The other issue is precisely how distressed your trainers should be
(regardless of the brand, white trainers just look better when white), and these
versions suggest a solid two months skateboarding is the optimum in
distressed-ness. With distressed clothes you can be whatever you want to be
without putting the hours in.
