It reminds me of something Martine Rose often says about an acid-smiley Boy London T-shirt given to her by an older cousin in the ’90s. “It’s been washed thousands and thousands of times, and it’s imbued with so much emotion and wear that I find it’s become this fragile, delicate, amazing thing, something that you can never buy off the peg. That is the definition of luxury,” she told Gilded Birds in 2021. Speaking to British Vogue three years later, she added that “it represents my nine-year-old self awakening to the otherness of subcultures”.
Vogue’s fashion and style editor Mahoro Seward has similar things to say about a now “sun-bleached, moth-eaten, disintegrated” Eckhaus Latta tee they bought on eBay at 20 years old. “I was obsessed with the brand’s high-brow yet off-kilter runway pieces, but couldn’t afford any of the few pieces that made it into production back then,” they tell me. “I found this tee for a reasonable price and hit Buy It Now without a second thought. It felt like a membership badge to some secret fashion club that I was desperate to gain access to, and I wore it everywhere. It’s a souvenir of the early spark of a great life passion.”
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Fashion, of course, has long been fascinated by the way clothes change through wear—and what it means to wear something new that looks old. Vivienne Westwood stained and slashed T-shirts at the height of punk in the ’70s; Rei Kawakubo described the holes in her 1982 knits as “Comme des Garçons lace”, later telling Vogue that “too much importance has been placed on slick, polished images”. By the ’90s, as the threadbare aesthetic of grunge took hold, Martin Margiela was popularising “la mode destroy”—aka deconstructionism—and Hussein Chalayan buried his graduate collection in a friend’s garden and left it to decay for months, while Robert Cary-Williams sold bullet-ridden T-shirts inspired by William S Burroughs, who was known to shoot holes through books.
Not all such experiments have been well received. John Galliano’s controversial spring/summer 2000 “Hobo” collection, for example, drew inspiration from the worn-out clothes of unhoused people he encountered on the streets of Paris, and was criticised for aestheticising the kind of deprivation that others cannot simply buy their way out of. And yet distressed clothing has since become an accepted part of the modern wardrobe: ripped jeans, faux-battered trainers, fake band tees.