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Ana Andjelic: Off-White, Vetements, and the rise of the fashion trolls.

NEW YORK — A couple of weeks ago I found myself at the Dover Street Market in Tokyo. Among the usual posse of DSM brands, there was Gosha Rubchinskiy’s latest for Adidas: a long-sleeved t-shirt with the word “Adidas” written in Cyrillic. Other t-shirts used Cyrillic to spell “football” and “Dover Street Market Ginza.”

As a Cyrillic reader, this elicited a solid and prolonged eye roll. How stupid, uninformed, superficial — or all of these — do we, fashion consumers, come across when this is served up as “luxury” fashion? Gosha, Vetements, Balenciaga, Off-White, and Yeezy are all competing in a race to turn the mundane of objects into luxury commodities. Trendy clothes are turned into tangible ironic jokes: Spend $110 on a pair of socks, and you get to walk around wearing a joke at your own literal and figurative expense — all in the name of being cool.

In today’s internet-driven culture, over-memeification, hidden references, snark, and confusion abound. It’s like a jester winking all the time. For the longest time, for instance, Off-White’s fans thought that the brand’s clever tags — i.e. stitching “inner label” inside a jacket’s inner label, as if there were any confusion — were secret messages to be decoded. The fervor was enough to compel Off-White to release a how-to video instructing fans to “CUT THE TIE” and “LEAVE IT ALONE.”

And lest you think those quotation marks are random, they serve as the key pillar of Off-White’s brand identity. So is Gosha’s use of Cyrillic, and Vetements’ re-appropriation of the mundane — like the IKEA shopping bag, DHL t-shirts, and most recently, a souvenir NYC tote bag found at JFK airport.

The problem is, trolls don’t have the identity of their own. They are free-riders on the identities of others and capitalize on their instant recognizability and familiarity. And it’s a genius shortcut if there ever was one. Take the identity of say, IKEA, DHL, or whoever makes that New York City tote bag, and ridicule it (and those who buy it) by making a $1,950 version of it.

As a business model, it works — and as a brand-building model, it’s virtually bulletproof. Being reactionary and snarky means that you never need to come up with anything innovative or original. Ironic brands are seemingly beyond criticism. Everything they do is for the chuckle or the smirk.

It’s the ultimate irony in an era and a marketplace riddled with ironies. The brands praised as the freshest and the most original are those that don’t actually create a single new point of view. They manifest their anxiety of not truly belonging to the fashion world by mocking it, which in turn helps to elevate their status that much more.

Today’s high fashion is in flux. Anxiety is only natural, but the fact that the new leaders of the industry — the Balenciagas of the world — are currently defining the industry only in terms of what high fashion isn’t, should truly be troubling.

Fashion is the important engine for visual culture. It’s a documentary snapshot of our society at any given moment. The same idea can live as a $1,950 New York City tourist tote, as the President’s tweet, or as a Pepe Le Frog meme.

We live in a socio-political climate of anxiety. But what fends it off is having a clear identity of your own. IKEA does IKEA just fine. So does DHL. And so does the inner label on your jacket — without Off-White’s clever quotes.

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  • Richard Ross

    Maxed out on my daily sodium intake with how salty this article is.