The real reason behind Balenciaga’s love affair with the absurd
At a time where fashion’s greatest sin is to be boring, we’ve now embraced a more radical idea: fashion so intentionally jarring, it makes you squint. Balenciaga’s latest provocations lead the charge – the Zero shoe and the now-infamous 30-minute dress. If you’ve ever felt confused, amused, or vaguely insulted by what passes as high fashion, congratulations: you’re tuned into the zeitgeist which is ugly fashion.
Let’s start with the Zero. At first glance, you might mistake it for the remnants of a particularly bad sandal accident – an almost-nothing design that costs USD450 for something that is essentially a rubber sole, toe grips, and heel caps. Only those succumbing to their foot fetish-y ways would spend that kind of money.
Balenciaga went from creating the fattest, most maximalist sneakers to taking the word minimalism way too seriously. Their minimalist mantra has reached a level so extreme that even flip-flops feel over-engineered in comparison. Available in black, white, tan, and brown, these lightweight foam shoes are less a “look” and more a vibe: that of someone who wants to appear barefoot but shan’t risk stubbing their toes on their way to out of the house.
Couture or content?
Predictably, the internet had thoughts. Beini Qian, Balenciaga’s head of sneakers and self-declared barefoot enthusiast (strange that you’d hire one of those to head a footwear department), revealed the Zero on Instagram in early December, where reactions ranged from polite skepticism to outright outrage. One particularly concise comment summed it up: “Please go to hell.” But in a world where high fashion thrives on pushing boundaries (and buttons), this wasn’t shocking. It was calculated. Fashion, after all, is about being noticed – and nothing screams “notice me” louder than a shoe that looks like it could double as part of a contemporary art installation – and that’s not meant in a good way.
The Zero isn’t alone in its audacious absurdity. This has been the year of slim and strange footwear, from Miu Miu’s 2D New Balance sneakers to Coperni’s ballet flats that look like they could disintegrate if it rained. The through-line here is that ugly fashion is a term that’s less about literal ugliness and more about challenging the aesthetics we’ve been conditioned to admire. It’s about rejecting traditional ideas of beauty, and instead, elevating the awkward, the unexpected, and sometimes, the downright hideous.
But why are we trading timeless elegance for irony-laden oddities? Some of it traces back to normcore, the anti-fashion movement that took over a decade ago. Normcore glorified the ordinary: mom jeans, white sneakers, dad caps. It rejected high-maintenance glamour and embraced the unremarkable as a statement. Now, ugly fashion is like normcore’s foil – less about blending in and more about standing out by any means necessary.
Boo Balenciaga
Balenciaga, of course, is the movement’s reigning monarch. Take the brand’s 30-minute dress, which debuted at their fourth haute couture show this July. For those uninitiated in couture, this is the apex of fashion craftsmanship – a world where dresses can take hundreds of hours to complete, catering to an elite clientele of around only 4,000 people globally. And yet, Balenciaga presented a dress that took half an hour to make (they timed it) and was designed to unravel after one wear.
What does a disposable dress at couture level look like, you might ask. A black, scrunched nylon affair tied at the back with something that suspiciously resembled the grip of a forgotten hair scrunchie off someone’s wrist. To the untrained eye, it resembled the black trash bags your environmentally conscious aunt warned you never to use.
Critics were quick to pounce, not just over aesthetics, but questioning if a house as storied as Balenciaga should really be promoting disposability in fashion. But others saw the brilliance in its defiance – an irreverent comment on fast fashion, perhaps, or a middle finger to the traditional rules of couture.
This is the essence of ugly fashion. It’s provocative, polarising, and impossible to ignore. It thrives in an era of social media, where being memorable (for better or worse) is currency. In a sea of perfectly curated aesthetics that were collected during the height of minimalism and the clean-girl aesthetic, ugly fashion throws on its ugliest bathing suit and cannonballs into the water.
Ugly fashion vs ugly clothes
Yet it’s worth noting that ugly fashion isn’t bad fashion. There’s a distinction between clothing that’s intentionally disruptive and clothing that’s just poorly designed. Ugly fashion refers to specific eras, trends, or subcultures, reimagining them in ways that feel fresh, if not flattering. Think Gucci’s sparkling alien unitards, Vetements’ buttless jeans, or the endless parade of baffling celebrity looks that often set social media ablaze.
Of course, the appeal of ugly fashion isn’t universal. Straight men, in particular, often seem bewildered by its charms, preferring the safety of well-tailored suits and unremarkable footwear.
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