4.3 “It Is Ugly, That’s Why We Like It”, or Privileged Populism in High Fashion
In the next sections, I look at atmosphere of banal luxury, in particular those around Demna, Vetements, and Balenciaga. In this section, I focus on Demna’s privileged populism and continue with selfies and the poor chic in the performances of these brands. In all cases, a feeling of “banal” is acted upon luxury; banal refers not only to an object or gesture of bad taste but also to the ordinary, the tedious, and the uninspiring, which when purposefully performed upon luxury atmospheres appears as a subversive gesture. I also understand the banal as a notion that comes into efect within the contexts articulated, so in luxury fashion banal implies the common and the everyday as opposed to the elegance, privilege, and uniqueness that luxury ofers access to. The atmospheres of banal luxury I look at bridge a continuum between physical spaces, such as fashion events, and online spaces, such as interviews, clips, posts, and reels. Here and in the next sections, I follow selective moments of the banal luxury complex, including Instagram accounts (@ vetements\_oficial and @balenciaga @demnagram), interviews, fashion items, and public interactions. The interview format, for example, which we saw with Douglas, creates a stage where one can appear as radical, controversial, prophetic, and so on in the context of what Gernot Böhme calls “performance society” (2017: 17). Yet, to go back to Bourdieu, performances are subject to the rules of the field and the positions one is speaking from rather than free-floating exercises (1997). I regard the material, for instance, that I use from Demna’s interviews in this section as a linguistic performance specific to the luxury fashion field and the subfield that Demna navigates instead of a free-floating exercise in self-making; in luxury fashion, as in any other field, there is a struggle among the field’s players for defining dominant concepts, discourses, and values (Bourdieu, 2020; Bartlett, Cole, and Rocamora, 2018). Demna is part of “the post-Soviet fashion” scene (Bugajska, 2020; Simpson, 2021), which is a subfield of luxury fashion credited for queering the masculine body (Roberts, 2019), and whose other representatives include fashion designers Gosha Rubchinskiy and Lotta Volkova. Post-Soviet fashion channeled an excessive fashion style of “ugly” streetwear aesthetics and a conceptual remodeling of digital culture to global fashion, which Demna inherits and performs in the luxury fashion world.
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Cultures of Platform Capitalism