Fashion continually draws on reference. We all love Mary-Kate Olsen for her 'stylishly homeless' shabby chic style, and Kate Moss for her messy, over-partied, rock chick look, but do we ever stop to think what these references really mean?
For all MK's oversized lumberjack shirts, and Moss' mussed up hair there are plenty more negative implications to be taken from the points of reference from which their styles are taken. Is a coat that's filthy from sleeping in the street cool, or are dark concave eyes from lack of sleep and too many drugs sexy? Could we perhaps be trivialising issues by turning them into fashionable styles?
It is for this reason that Vivienne Westwood's 'message of tolerance', demonstrated in her 'gypsy' themed menswear collection in Milan this week, has not been well received. At her show on Sunday, Westwood presented her models as 'rough, stylish and hardened', in order to celebrate the 'outcasts of society'.
Milan's assessor for Industry and Fashion, Tiziana Maiolo who spent time working in gypsy camps in and around Milan however, has criticised Westwood for indulging in 'a romantic notion about gypsies that is 100 years out of date'.
Indeed, presenting a romanticised, glamorised notion of a troubled community could perhaps be considered a little innappropriate, do you agree?
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