By Katie Kieffer

Fashion Designer, Vivienne Westwood

Homeless haute couture. Doesn’t that sound sweet? What could be more loving than clothing the poor and destitute on the streets?

The answer, sadly, is anything but homeless haute couture.  Homeless haute culture is nothing more than a safe layer of wearable bubble-wrap for elite paper gangsters to profit from poverty and ignore reality.

Last week, British fashion designer, Dame Vivienne Westwood, rolled out her new line of menswear at Milan Fashion Week and her models were dressed for the streets. Westwood’s models strutted the catwalk – complete with greasy, unwashed “street hair” – and sported accessories such as cardboard boxes, bedrolls and sleeping bags.

Image credit: timesonline.co.uk

Westwood’s decision to roll out this line of expensive rags, that most Americans could “knock off” for pennies at Goodwill, was not an altruistic attempt to raise awareness for homelessness. Rather, it was the Dame’s attempt to shock, and cash in. In fact, Westwood was so intent on shocking the pants off her Milan audience that she showcased a model in a Guantánamo-style orange boilersuit. Criminals, terrorists and street-shufflers appear to be inspirational for Westwood.

This is not the first time Westwood has showcased her naïve approach to terrorism via the arts. She developed t-shirts (presumably for non-terrorists) stating, “I am not a terrorist. Please don’t arrest me.” She also wrote a political song about “the legalized, 42-day detention of suspected terrorists,” because it definitely should not be legal to hold a would-be underwear bomber under surveillance. Heck, they are the perfect target market for Westwood’s t-shirts and we wouldn’t want to deprive her of these sales!

Westwood also admits she has no clue what it is like to be homeless. “The nearest I have come to it is going home and finding I don’t have my door key,” she said. She does know, however, how to draw cheers from liberal fashion designers. Her secret process is to design radical fashions that mock capitalism (while profiting from it), pander to man-made global warming extremists (see photo below) and trivialize terrorist threats.

Image credit: timesonline.co.uk

When designers like Westwood glorify rags, they are making a political statement. They are echoing the pathetic theme of this year’s NYE Ball Drop, “Let there be courage,” that essentially prepared Americans to accept a “new normal” lifestyle and bow under the weight of government-induced national debt.

Homeless haute couture ushers in a new era where fashion encourages men and women to “love the earth before themselves,” clothe themselves in leaves and cheerfully endure homelessness. The message is: Houses, heat, electricity, running water, clothing mills and indoor toilets are boring, bad and uncool. Roughing it the homeless way preserves the earth from the horrors of carbon emissions. As a LEED AP, I believe in preserving the environment, but I do not subscribe to extremism or ignoring real science.

Another “benefit” of homelessness in the eyes of elite designers could be that it represents dependency and a parasitic lifestyle – completely opposite of American entrepreneurship, innovation and freedom. Westwood’s fashions send the message that dependency is the way to go.

Why spend time developing a business plan? You might make lots of money and exercise your brain cells, but is it really worth the stress? Better to be a child of nature, and hand your cares over to the government.

Unlike Westwood, I think wearing rags when you don’t need to, or flat-out shouldn’t, could signal one or all of the following problems:

1. Laziness. “I don’t feel like wearing a suit. If I lose a client because I show up to a pitch in my Nascar hoodie and stained camo pants, I could care less. I’m sure D.C. will bail me out.”
2. Immaturity. “I never want to grow up. Grown-ups have to wear uncomfortable, “Dry-Clean-Only” clothing. I usually don’t bother to dress myself at all. I love to laze around in my Snuggie all day long.”
3. Ignorance. “On first dates, I always wear my comfy, broken-in sweats. All the best dating advice says to “be yourself” and “be confident.” Why should I try to be someone I’m not?”
4. Overconfidence. “If people can’t accept me for who I am, then I don’t want them as friends. I don’t wash my hair more than once every two weeks. I am thrifty and I save money by skipping the dentist. I don’t own a nail clipper. My motto is: Get over your obsession with hygiene or get out of my (oops, I don’t have a house) cardboard box.”

Licensed therapists and some former homeless individuals say many people on the streets live self-inflicted lifestyles. Homelessness is not something to be upheld and glamorized through fashion. It must be remedied through private charity, outreach and education, not celebrity-style social dependence.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 7:35 am and is filed under Entertainment & Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can trackback from your own site.