Deconstructing distressed

MTWTFSS Weekday - Fall/Winter 2010/11

Spurning signs of conspicuous consumption, distressed looks are increasingly preferred to spanking new getups. The less out of place an item would be at an archaeological dig, the more character it has. The allure of both ruins and modern architecture explain the trend of ripped jeans, shredded t-shirts and so on. The new shows how far we’ve come and the old reveals where we’ve been. Many labels have cashed in on the aesthetic, pulling apart and tearing up their wares to sell at prices that inflict the same on your wallet.

While fashion is about dress up and make-believe, destruction is sometimes beautiful because it appears in a context that lends it meaning. For clothes, tears and rips recall the time you caught your shirt jumping over a fence, dropped cigarette ash on it, etc. They look cool because they recall your accident, your history or someone else’s that has been passed on to you. When you wear a shirt with a rip in the armpit in the same spot as thousands of other people, you outsource a job that’s second nature for us: screwing shit up. MTWTFSS’s shirt is an example of distressed I do like, as it doesn’t pretend to have a story - its unraveling threads brag about holding a perfect pattern and doing double duty catching prey for spiders, nothing more to it.