I became vaguely aware of this… fashion trend? a few years ago on reddit. And it seems there is now at least one Lemmy community devoted to it.

So genuine question - is all streetwear just an elaborate joke, like when that guy put a urinal in an art museum to make a point about the nature of art? Because it seems like the unifying theme in streetwear is that it all looks like it is intentionally bad. Like the designer saw all the ways normal people dressed themselves poorly, and emphasized those traits. If I saw someone walking down the street in clothes I normally see posted on /c/streetwear, I would wonder what kind of bet they lost.

Do I just not “get” art? Am I now just one of the olds? What is going on here?

  • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org
    1·
    8 months ago

    Fashion is, when you buy things that are so ugly that you definitely want everything new after half a year :)

  • litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    I think you’ll have to provide some examples – ideally as photos – of streetwear fashion. Without any prior research, I only know the term to mean “comfy clothes” that would fall below the typical bar for “casual” dress code.

    A quick web search shows examples ranging from perfectly reasonable outfits consisting of normally-proportioned shorts, jackets, pants, and shoes. To some outlandish outfits that are prominently displaying designer brands.

    And perhaps that’s the crux of the matter: what shows up on the fashion runway or “haute couture” magazines is never descriptive but prescriptive: a designer brand has a vested interest in getting the masses to believe that something is fashion so that they can move product.

    Taken to the logical extreme, there is an idea that designer clothes are intentionally outlandish, precisely so that said clothes would never be worn by “normies” in day-to-day activities, and thus can always (and persistently) be projected as high-end.

    Commercialized fashion is not a democratic experiment to see what most people want to wear. It is to move product every “fashion season”. “Designer streetwear” is a poor approximation for what normal people wear when they just want to grab a sandwich from the bodega and then return to watch another episode from Season 2 of The Rehearsal. Maybe this should be called “real streetwear” to distinguish it from so-called designer goods.

  • JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world
    1·
    8 months ago

    I used to think that. But then I realized that art is an appreciation of beauty both within and outside the realms of conventional tastes. I realized my own tastes had become aligned with the commercial zeitgeist and I was shutting out other creative expressions that, while unconventional, had merit by its own right - by simply existing. I had become the barrier to expression by my crass judgement, and by extension, the gatekeeper of what I professed to love - creativity.

    Now., if your question was ‘are <insert the example that is rankling your bones> these street wear examples commercially viable’? Then the answer is ‘it depends on the buyer’.