Pitti Uomo has always been home to the dandiest of the dandy’s — the Super Bowl of Getting Fits Off™, if you will — but, in keeping with the direction of upscale menswear at large, the New York Times is reporting that “fugly” is the new look du jour.
While Pitti used to be a showcase of style that was “decorative, anachronistic, highly refined and considered,“ this new wave of menswear, and it’s embrace of all things gaudy, bulky and, as they repeatedly say, “fugly,” is “so deliberately and uproariously awful, so defiant of traditional canons of taste you almost have to applaud it.”
Keying in on footwear as menswear’s entry point into ugly fashion, the story posits that “Instagram [made] it necessary for designers to produce products whose iconography produces a pop on a smartphone screen” and that sneakers play the best on the medium.
As Nick Sullivan, the fashion director of Esquire, says, “Designer brands have become beacons of fugly precisely because people have replaced shopping for things with posting them and then regramming them. Old-fashioned taste at the moment is out of taste.”
Meanwhile, Jian DeLeon, the editorial director of Highsnobiety, “characterizes [the modern consumer] as ‘a jaded, post-ironic and highly engaged fashion acolyte.’” Which, I guess, is one way to justify dressing like an asshat.
Ugly clothes for ugly times, or something like that.
You can read more about it at The New York Times.
