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Last week, a pair of “pee-stained” jeans from British-Italian luxury brand Jordanluca set the internet alight. Having first debuted on the Autumn/Winter 2023 runway, Jordanluca’s divisive jeans became a sudden viral sensation after randomly being spotlighted by the New York Post on 26 April. Before long they became global news, hitting headlines on TMZ, The Daily Mail and daytime TV.
Designed to make the wearer look as though they’ve wet themselves, the jeans elicited varying responses: anger, disgust, confusion. “Why would anyone wear this?” lambasted critics, who complained about the $800 price tag. Others were intrigued. Over the next few days, Jordanluca’s site traffic increased by over 1,000 per cent, while the remaining 70 per cent of the jeans stock sold out.
While the virality has resulted in some strong sales, for the Jordanluca duo (the label was founded by Jordan Bowen and Luca Marchetto in 2018), the jeans were intended to continue their exploration of kink as a house code, rather than become a bestseller. Despite mountains of requests, they’ve decided against producing more pairs and capitalising on the social media buzz. “[The jeans are] about fetish in its truest form,” says Jordanluca co-founder Bowen. But the subsequent commotion has now turned them into a comment on the fetish of capitalism, too, adds fellow founder Marchetto.
“The jeans are a comment on the fact that we don’t really need more clothes but we have an obsessive love affair with stuff,” says Marchetto. “Consumerism is an obscene fetish. We buy things not because we need them, but because they are an emotional turn-on.” Jordanluca is now “part of this viral consumerism spiral”, he acknowledges, but that’s why they decided to not reissue the jeans.
Some of fashion’s biggest success stories have followed this playbook over the last decade, creating outlandish and ridiculous meme-worthy clothing that comments on capitalist culture, ironically driving sales for luxury labels and conglomerates. Jordanluca is testament to the fact that when packaged correctly, consumers have a long-standing fascination with capitalism gimmicks, even as trends have waxed and waned in recent years.
The concept arguably originated from luxury ready-to-wear brand Vetements, founded by Georgian designers Demna and Guram Gvasalia in 2014. Vetements disrupted the industry with its subverted takes on often-banal wardrobe staples, like their DHL worker tops, oversized hoodies that appropriated consumerist logos, and ugly dad sneakers. Most famously, the brothers held their ‘anti-capitalist’ SS20 show in the Champs Élysées McDonald’s, where models wore “Hello I am Capitalism” tees (that later retailed for $600) and attendees were given menus where two of the courses were named “Kapitalism” and “Global Mind Fuck”.
The approach draws on the Gvasalias’s post-Soviet roots. As a teenager in Tbilisi, Demna once told System Magazine: “I remember seeing a Coke can for the first time and thinking it was a nuclear bomb.” This somewhat-outsider perspective was welcomed by the fashion community. Vetements hype grew quickly, and the brand was regularly worn by Rihanna, Kanye West and Kendall Jenner. Although they never officially released any financial data, revenues approached $100 million in 2017, per WWD. It also spawned a new generation of meme-making designers who comment on capitalism via absurd clothing, like Swedish brand Avavav’s “Cash Cow” SS23 graphic T-shirt and “Filthy Rich” hoodie.
However, as fashion historian Elizabeth Wilson once said, “Fashion is the child of capitalism.” Designers selling expensive pieces soon end up profiting from the very system they’re critiquing, and the line between commentary and gimmick is fine, especially when virality is a common side effect.
“I think designers who walk down that path can confuse getting a laugh or a repost out of the brand’s audience with actual commentary,” says fashion critic Ryan Yip, who adds that just because we find it funny, doesn’t mean the clothing is truly impactful. “It becomes a marketing tool instead of pure-hearted social commentary, which counter logically becomes a part of capitalism instead of going against.”
Why would someone buy these products?
Capitalism-critiquing clothes are often ugly, ridiculous or straight-up unwearable. So why is there such a huge appetite for them?
“Maybe the designers do have that [anti-capitalism] in mind. But I don’t think that’s why people are interested in these products,” explains consumer psychologist and London College of Fashion lecturer Patrick Fagan on the attitude-behaviour gap. “Ugliness, difference, surprise, disgust. These things grab attention.” He points out that the first step to buying something is noticing it, which makes the shock factor a great strategy for brands to increase sales. Fagan also points to “cost signalling”, whereby wearers flaunt their ability to spend extreme amounts of money on what others deem as “garbage clothing”, as a potential status driver for those buying in.
“In this case of ‘ridiculous’ clothing, it’s always a bit of ‘if you know, you know’, ‘if you laugh, then I know you’re not as sophisticated as me’ type of situation,” says Yip. He states that those who get the joke or messaging do not think the designer is actively trying to con their money, they believe being part of the joke is “showing cultural understanding, and at times, allegiance to the brand”. It’s a willing transaction, “one gets the money, one gets a cultural-sophistication signifier”, he says.
Jesica Wagstaff, fashion theorist and writer, says that while people may come up with all sorts of reasoning for buying into these pieces, in the majority of cases, “they are just early adopters. Their taste and status is dependent on being first. Whether they truly align with what the clothes communicate or what they even look like is not the point.”
Will capitalism gimmicks ever die?
Though critiquing capitalism at the same time as creating product might have been possible at one point, Wagstaff feels it might be going out of style. “With such rapid trend cycles, having 52 seasons a year, plus the rise of fast fashion, it’s really hard to make this case when capitalism sits front and centre in the industry now more than ever.”
Demna took the Vetements viewpoint to Balenciaga, where he was appointed creative director in 2015. Under his control, Balenciaga began selling $1,740 rubbish bags, “ugly pumps” collaborations with Crocs (retailing for nearly $700) and the infamous Paris sneaker, which was a dirty, beat-up high top that contradicted its $2,000 price tag. Balenciaga’s ‘Money is the Biggest Fetish in the World’ resort 2023 show took place at the New York Stock Exchange, and featured models in gimp masks, an observation that we’re “slaves to capitalism”. Ironic, as the last time Kering released Balenciaga’s revenues in 2021 it revealed a turnover of €1.2 billion for the Spanish house.
Still, consumers lapped it up. Balenciaga appeared consistently in the top three of the Lyst Index’s quarterly hottest-brands list between Q2 2016 and Q3 2022. However, the following quarter, after the brand released two controversial adverts kicking up public backlash, the brand fell from Lyst’s top spot to number 11, with Demna vowing to return to “the art of making clothes” in his first AW23 couture collection, post-scandal.
For two seasons it seemed he had put an end to the gimmick movement, with the brand returning to house codes and high-quality craftsmanship. That was until the end of 2023 where he released a $925 towel skirt, and debuted his AW24 show featuring Erewhon bags and lip-filler models, on Hancock Park’s Windsor Boulevard in LA. Why won’t the gimmick die?
Fagan argues that brands behaving this way is a “great example of perhaps even the worst excesses of capitalism”. He continues: “It’s preying on people’s biases and emotions and weakness and vulnerabilities to make money from them. Really, it’s capitalism in the extreme.”
Jordanluca is aware of the paradox. “It’s not a binary answer. The concept [of the jean] is part of the conversation but the product is part of the capitalist structure,” says Bowen, who adds that “capitalism is a spectrum”.
“The ultimate fetish for us is to know that there is a [batch] of piss jeans increasing in value without us having to feed the mouth of a hungry system by producing more and more and more,” he explains of their decision. “It reflects something about the world, and that’s something that fashion is meant to do,” he says. For the co-founders, it’s all about the value of the conversation it generates, and knowing when to be in and when to be out. “Or you need to live in a cave and not do anything,” says Marchetto.
What’s more, the gimmicks can feed the brand’s creativity long term. “It is really hard because just like other art forms that sit in between the artistic and the practical, brands in some way need to sell in order to survive and continue to commentate and influence,” agrees commentator Yip.
While gimmicks and outlandish garments can thrust emerging labels like Jordanluca into the mainstream, Wagstaff feels it shouldn’t be a brand code. “We also get weary of having to get it,” she continues. “When you hit us with gimmicks, year after year, season after season, there’s really nothing to gasp at anymore. The magic of fashion is lost because we’re constantly being preached to.” She adds that this is especially true, “if the message starts to feel flat, or if we can no longer believe in the messenger.”
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