Streetwear and ugly dad trainers are already becoming less fashionable
opinion
Fashion in the last few years has gone all streetwear.
With long-time Kanye West collaborator Virgil Abloh now Louis Vuittons artistic director of menswear and everyone from Alexander Wang to Raf Simons partnering up with Adidas, streetwear has taken over.
But parents with cupboards full of limited edition trainers, 50-year-olds wearing Supreme jumpers and fashions need to be ahead of the curve means it is time to move on.
In the typical pendulum of fashion, fashion works in a call and response way, Tim Blanks, editor-at-large of The Business Of Fashion has said.
Were already seeing whats coming after that sportswear takeover and thats a quite rarefied notion of male couture.
Its inevitable when dads are wearing Triple S that the people looking for their own modes of self-expression start looking at the opposite. Its always happened: sportswear, tailoring, sportswear, tailoring.
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The most recent mens runway shows had front rows of influencers and key figures all wearing ugly dad trainers like the ones Balenciaga has made sell-out desirable (above).
But the quick-moving fashion world is always looking for the new.
A recently shared satirical diagram provocatively titled fuccboi glass ceiling has a big diagram of streetwear, placing it just below the queer threshold and hovering above heterosexual soup with the captions Supreme, Y3 and Palace.
I feel really cynical about streetwear and what its doing to youth culture, artist and creator of the diagram Lucas Mascatello told Dazed.
Im not a huge fan of the fashion industry to begin with but streetwear turning kids into yuppies by domesticating and selling off subcultural aesthetics is particularly gross.
The discrepancy between fashion and streetwear should be imperceptible. Designer Nasir Mazhar has said that fashion should just be called fashion and streetwear is what the industry calls it when there are non-white models and relaxed silhouettes.
But now that gap is closing and the fashion industry is (all too slowly) fixing its whitewashing of trends and models, the people wearing the clothes are likely to already have moved on.
More: Fashion
When it comes to shoes, the trainer is so saturated that the teenagers of today will look elsewhere.
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The magic term thrown to me by retailers who have to know what theyre going to be selling next is dress shoes, says Blanks.
Their most adventurous customers want ye olde leather shoes.
While theyll be a lot less comfortable (unless theres big innovation to follow), wearing smart shoes now will show youre ahead of the game, just like Depeche Mode and Duran Duran did when the pendulum swung towards couture in the 80s.
It at least means you wont wear ugly dad trainers any more. And with dads wearing streetwear anyway, the next swing of fashion will be a welcome one.
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