Balmain Spring Summer 2009, the $2,000 ripped jeans.
This is my first guest post, written by Chris Low, a friend from London. Chris is Scottish, and is not a fashion person, but his opinionated rants never fail to make me laugh. He keeps emailing me about my blog posts, and I always tell him he needs to 1- post it as a comment so that others can share the joy, and 2- start his own blog. He does neither, so I told him to write me a post. Here it is.
(By the way, for my North American readers…the term footballer refers to a soccer player! Not one of those overgrown NFL muscle heads that are too wimpy to play rugby, so they opt for the pussy’s version instead.)
Rip It Up & Start Again by Chris Low
If there is one rule in men’s fashion to adhere to it must surely be ‘if a footballer would wear it – avoid it’. Just as in olden times miners would carry a budgerigar on the end of a stick, extended before them to detect any incipient gas leaks, as soon as footballers enter clothes stores one can only conclude their staff ensure only the most tasteless of garments are on display.
One such accoutrement, which always features highly amongst the wardrobes of footballers, reality show contestants and members of boy bands, is ‘designer distress’. An almost ‘extreme sports’ league up from the ‘faux-faded look’ of yesteryear where denim manufacturers got their interns to lie in the middle of roads till the roadworks lorry trundled along and painted over them with five inch wide white stripes, designer distress is where areas of a garment will be cut, slashed or otherwise left to resemble something Freddie Kruger has lost his temper with.
Balmain long sleeve t-shirt, $282 (Canadian dollars.)
A case in point being this striped top from Balmain. Like Archimedes discovering the theory of displacement, I thought my perennial search for the perfect striped top may have been at an end. I could stitch up & live with the nonsense round the collar (which incidentally, looks like it was ‘sandpapered’; a trick favored by street cred crazed crusty punks since the early ’80s) but checking on the back view and OH, THE HORROR! - ’designer’ rips on the arms. In literal terms: a few deft slashes transforming a perfectly attractive top into something only to be worn by footballers, reality show contestants and members of boy bands.
I understand Balmain is famous for such foolishness. Witness the ‘Lindsay Lohan’ jeans which, apart from having a top right thigh that looks like it’s been used to distract the tiger that mauled Siegfried & Roy, has ugly big holes of crudely contrived ‘wear’ in an area that would probably only get worn down if one spent a lot of time bent over and in receipt of vigorous, friction causing propulsion. Probably not a look Ms Lohan should aspire to with such candor.
Lindsay Lohan in ripped jeans from Balmain.
However, those are beacons of taste & restraint when compared to these monstrosities below. Might they even have been a well tailored pair of jeans before death by a thousand cuts? Who can tell? Now they look like they’ve been taken off someone who was run over by a train. And WTF’s with the BROWN STAINS on the back pockets??? Perhaps when the original wearer was thrown to the lions he was wearing a colostomy bag and that got clawed as well? There’s Manhattan ‘Hobo-chic’ and there’s just looking like a drunk who’s lost control of their bodily functions. If the jeans were light blue – and sans the brown stain – one could just about get away with wearing them if one’s occupation was dancing in a cage in a club called The Manhole. But other than that I am lost as to just whom they could appeal to. In fact what they remind me of is the end result of a cartoon character lighting up a stick of dynamite thinking it was a cigar. A look whoever would wear these jeans may wish to accentuate by spiking their hair horizontal, covering their face in soot and sporting a perpetually startled expression.
Balmain Jeans, $848 (Canadian Dollars.)
And I’m not going to even START on the unlaced army boots look as evidenced on the models. Looking like a footballer is bad enough; looking like a roadie for The Levellers is simply beyond the pale.
So, my hunt goes on for the perfect striped top. A shame Balmain felt the need to ruin this one or they’d have had a sale and I could have moved on to devoting my energies to finding the perfect pair of jeans. A search I doubt would ever find me calling at Balmain’s door.
Balmain images from Luisa Via Roma.
Lindsay Lohan image source.
Catwalk image from Style.com.
