Haute Mess: Runway Edition

You can dress it up as “avant-garde” but you can’t take out the radical politics

Me: “Siri, why do I hate high fashion?”

Siri: “Here’s what I found:”

Wow, Siri! You hit the nail on the head. ‘Runway models dressed like psych ward patients’ is exactly why I hate high fashion.

I get it though. It’s a ruthlessly competitive industry. You want to generate buzz. Then again, is buzz worth the savage mockery on social media? (Like this prankster who went viral for storming the runway in a trash bag and makeshift durag. The audience sophisticates were fully credulous until security tackled him.) Do they think Zoolander was a documentary? What is going on here?

Then it hit me: Neo-Marxist theory has hijacked high fashion.

Variously referred to as ‘critical theory,’ ‘postmodern theory’ and ‘deconstructionism,’ neo-Marxism first thrived in esoteric academic circles, before escaping the ivory tower and infecting the culture at large—kind of like how Covid escaped a Wuhan lab.

Critical theory challenges power structures while dismantling inequalities and…

🥱🥱🥱 zzzzzzzzzzzzzz….. boooooooring…

Yes, I know it’s boring! Also, abstruse, deliberately so, as evidenced by a typical course catalog title: “Toward a Queer Ontology of Absence — Deconstructing the Post-Object in Late Capitalist Affect.”

The point is what neo-Marxism has wrought. It’s why a banana duct-taped to a gallery wall sold to a crypto-billionaire for $6.2 million. It’s behind the ghoulish works of Andre Serrano and Jana Sterbak’s Flesh Dress. It’s why Lars von Trier films are larded with Kafkaesque dread and dream logic in place of a plot. I could go on… and on… but you get the idea.

Suffice it to say, critical theory has polluted universities and every last instrument of soft power. Why would venerable fashion schools be spared? The signs are all there. At every major fashion week, tradition rides backseat to hyper-progressive spectacle. Once seen, you can’t unsee it. So let’s break down how today’s avant-garde fashionistas follow the same tired playbook of this bleak ideology…

---

Rule number 1: human sexuality is just theory

Remember the days of the sexy supermodel—those leggy sirens who embodied transcendent beauty, charisma and glamour? Whatever happened to them? Two words: critical theory.

The era of the supermodel—coincidentally or not—vanished off the radar just as neo-Marxism rose in influence. The female form devolved from something erotic into a lecture on gaze theory. Sexuality, both in academic circles and on the runway, turned clinical, even grim—a social construct to be categorized, politicized and fetishized.

The evidence manifests every couture season with a growing preference for vinyl, latex and hard synthetics over soft, sensuous fabrics like silk and velvet. Also, a near-religious obsession with “upcycling”—IE: trash. Oh—and gimp masks! Balenciaga designer Demna loves them because who doesn’t love to accessorize with a symbol of suffering, torture, deprivation and debasement?

We also have, among an embarrassment of choices, Dutch designer Duran Lantink, heir apparent to the creative director job at Gaultier, who has an autist’s fascination with breasts. This year he closed his show with a model wearing a silicone-boob top…

---

Rule number 2: Irony over sincerity and meta ‘everything’

Because irony undermines authority and allows for multiple interpretations, critical theory is, by default, ironic.

Layers of self-reference and detached irony pile up in the avant-garde designer’s repertoire until meaning itself becomes a riddle wrapped in a smirk. Consider Canadian design duo Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran, who go by the name Matières Fécales—because what could be more archly self-aware than branding yourself literally as shit?

Maybe the clothes are OK—hard to say, when their models are affectless, post-human drones who look like they'd happily beat you to death with a golf club…

---

Rule number 3: Erase gender boundaries

All that endless talk about gender you hear these days? You can trace much of it back to the postmodern thinkers who laid the groundwork—chief among them Judith Butler, a they/them Berkeley professor and author of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

High fashion has always blurred the line between masculine and feminine aesthetics but the influence of critical theory has made it a religion, shifting the conversation from questioning gender norms to questioning visual coherence. It’s now normal for hirsute, ruddy ectomorphs like Sam Smith to cosplay as beautiful models…

---

Rule number 4: flatten cultural hierarchies

According to neo-Marxism, all artifacts of cultural expression are equal. Consider the post-war fashion runway—a gilded Parisian salon steeped in rococo splendor and soft afternoon light, with swan-like models gliding by in duchess satin and gossamer tulle. Christian Dior’s New Look made this his temple while he resurrected beauty and sophistication from the ashes of wartime austerity.

Balenciaga aims to bring us full circle, swapping the salon for a muddy Mad Max wasteland or simulated blizzard, in which the models—greasy-haired with thousand-yard stares—trudge through fake snow, clutching garbage bags. “The Mud Show,” Balenciaga’s 2022 spectacle, unfolded beneath a glowing, post-nuclear sky, complete with scowling automatons and Ye looking as chipper as ever.

Postmodern theory rejects old hierarchies, above all religious ones. As high and low, sacred and profane are reduced to aesthetic choices, taboo imagery—things like pentagrams, goatheads and upsidedown crosses—follow…

---

Rule number 5: pastiche over originality

Remixing, quoting, and recontextualizing are the bread and butter of critical theory—and it shows. To operate in the context of avant-garde design is to layer era, genre, texture and colour to the point of visual psychosis…

A Zoomer “mishmash” aesthetic now dominates the pages of Teen Vogue, a magazine that traded lip gloss and prom dresses for angry ethno-Marxist takes on capitalism, Israel, toxic masculinity and whiteness.

Its editorial pages are a Gen Z bricoleur playground—what I described in an earlier post as “layering ill-fitting Y2K sweatshop deadstock over a vintage 1970s Butterick pattern creation, accessorized with kitschy ’80s homemade jewelry and something aggressively kawaii—like that emetic Hello Kitty cuteness Japanese girls never seem to outgrow.”

---

Rule number 6: weird the normal and normal the weird

Flipping the script on what’s normal and what’s strange is basically the first commandment of postmodern theory. Play along and you can believe crickets are a high-protein superfood, brutalist concrete is beautiful, and a banana duct-taped to a wall qualifies as fine art. In this world, history is just a matter of opinion, and the bedrock institutions of society? Mere bourgeois relics. Take the nuclear family, rebranded with deadpan defiance by Calvin Klein—on Mother’s Day, no less.

The reinterpretation of beauty and taste has reached a point where it verges on cultural gaslighting. If you think a hairy dude with a baby bump looks a little off, maybe you’re the weirdo.

The true irony here is how none of it feels edgy anymore. If you’re a young designer trying to make waves, maybe skip this chapter in history and try something genuinely daring: authenticity and emotional honesty. The world’s starving for it.