fashion style trends

Even a simple wifebeater tank top can sell for over $100 if it has the right label. We buy peasant blouses at faux-boho Anthropologie because we want to look like we churn butter on a farm in Provence, or grungy $80 pants at Urban Outfitters to show our downtown cool. For his fall 2002 Marc by Marc Jacobs show, Jacobs sent models down the runway in mismatched grandma knits, oversized seventies scarves, rainbow-striped sweaters, jeans, and corduroysthe ultimate homegrown poor-girl look for the woman who has everything.

In early 2000, John Galliano took the dressed-down look one step further: he stunned the fashion crowd in Paris with his Homeless Chic couture show for Christian Dior, featuring models draped in torn clothes held together by string and strewn with kitchen utensils and miniature liquor bottles. In the world of the Fashion Victim, shopping at a thrift store is cool unless you are actually on welfare and have to buy all your clothes there. Some hard-core fashionistas insist they only shop second hand.

But it is usually not all from the buck-a-pound bin at the local thrift store. In recent years, designers like Imitation of Christ who rework vintage and thrift have become hip. The Fashion Victim drools over these born-again garments, which still possess some of the old, dirty charm but at twenty times the price. Today, even the mere implication that a garment is old can suffice. Gap and Abercrombie & Fitch have pilfered the word vintage for use on their fresh-fromthe- factory shirts and jeans to suggest classic style. Are we really fooled by a crisp new T-shirt that spells Gap Vintage in faded letters? Today, it is fun to think you are shopping downmarket. Cheap chic stores like H&M, Target, Japan’s Uniqlo, and Spain’s Mango have made fortunes in recent years selling cut-rate trends. But no true fashionista worth her salt would buy her entire wardrobe at one of these stores, so she engages in cheap chic in her own way, to the point at which cheap becomes a completely relative term. Moschino’s lower-priced line, called Moschino Cheap & Chic, is far from cheap for most shoppers. A Leopard coat and scarf retails for $1,340, and a Petal Trim Sweater for $615. Frugality at its finest, indeed.Street Style Trends Fashion Week Spring 2015 – Street Style 2015 Ltf