Quick! Uncultured Swine!
I was balls deep into an investigative piece for Dis Content this week until a cultural emergency flew onto my desk. Balenciaga’s Towel Skirt (below middle) had experts and think tanks firing on all stations; some dismayed, some unbothered, some horrified at the $925 USD price tag. Allow me to throw some cold water on the situation (which can conveniently be mopped up) and reveal the real movement behind the towel.
Unless you’ve been living under a peaceful rock where all is quiet and TikTok doesn’t exist, you’ve likely been confronted with the Balenciaga brand name. Notorious for creating spectacles instead of fashion and synonymous with the ringard Kardashian clan, Balenciaga isn’t a stranger to industry scrutiny and their new Towel Skirt is no exception. Actually, it isn’t exceptional in many senses.
It seems our collective amnesia doesn’t just apply to Balenciaga’s hastily forgotten child-pornography incident. If we cast our minds further back we can trace the DNA of the Towel Skirt to an art movement that similarly questioned our relationship to objects: Dada. By being an ineffectual designer, Creative Director, Demna, has revived a century old Dadaist debate (with one notable difference - but we’ll get to that).
In 1917, French artist, Marcel Duchamp, pissed some people off by grabbing a urinal, signing it and putting in an art gallery. Fountain (above) was holistically rejected by art elites and edged out of exhibition by the Society of Independent Artists in New York to the frustration, and maybe slight bemusement, of Duchamp.
By this point he’d already ushered in the era of what was dubbed his Readymades, but it was the unsavoury selection of a urinal that bore the scandal and raised questions about what constitutes art. If something is crafted and objectively beautiful surely it’s qualifies as a piece of art? Therein lies the Readymade tension and ergo its success.
Enabling deliberation of what is and isn’t art was the point of Duchamp’s work (or so legend goes). Coming back to the present, do we consider Balenciaga’s Towel Skirt a continuation of Duchamp’s legacy or just a marketing stoop? There was a trifle more breadth than Readymades involved the Dada movement which makes answering the above question complicated.
Dadaist’s were kind of trolls. Believing that rationality led to conflict, the movement was decidedly nonsensical and playfully aggravated convention. But beneath its silly façade was an earnest reaction to modernity; capitalism, mass manufacturing and conflict left scars and the only way to make sense of them was to make no sense at all. Hannah Hoch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Epoch of Weimar Beer-Belly Culture in Germany (above left) and Francis Picabia’s Machine Turn Quickly (above right) senselessly winked at those preoccupations with modernity.
It isn’t dissimilar to the creative response to modernity we’re finding now. Images on Instagram are steeped in irony or captioned with unrelated nonsense. TikTok is a hyper reel of people, objects, anywhere with no-context, much like Hochs photomontage. Earnestness is losing its battle to nihilism in Gen Z (and younger) and you wonder if, in a world that’s making less and less sense, we’ll see an increase in flouting convention.
Which is why it’s understandable, maybe even likeable, that Balenciaga is asking what belongs in fashion. And while I hope Demna is laughing at the world genuinely contemplating his suggestion, I’d say realistically he considers himself a visionary, much like Duchamp. But after a century of Readymades, what is he really adding to the question of what is and isn’t art other than a $925 price tag?
SEE I TOLD YOU I’D POUR COLD WATER ON IT FUCK. So slick when I sharpen those journalistic tools of mine. Please, stay with me because Christmas is going to be silly and fun and not at all cannony!
Thanks Grace for editing (so late too) and YOU FOR READING EMAIL WITH THOUGHTS AND RECOMENDATIONS LOVE YOU
C U Next Tuesday xxx
Maggie Jeannnnnn xxxx