Fashion's Big Ick: How Ugly Became Cool
I have a penchant for ugly things. Ugly clothes, ugly jewellery, ugly paint colours – when redecorating my flat, I chose a palette of 1970s-style muddy browns that translate horribly on camera, a fact I find oddly pleasing. A friend of mine occasionally sends me links to shoes she deems offensively hideous – on account of an impractically sculptural heel or some other element antithetical to good taste – accompanied by a caption along the lines of ‘bet you love these, you weirdo’, and honestly, most of the time, she’s right.
Yet – if you’ll forgive a moment of unabashed pretentiousness– I consider myself something of an aesthete: someone who appreciates beautiful things and thinks they enrich our lives; who wants a beautiful home filled with beautiful art, and the beautiful wardrobe to go with it. And still – the allure of the ugly.
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There is so much more to good taste than mere loveliness. As an insecure teenager (and, ahem, adult), I took the French phrase jolie laide to heart: the literal translation is ‘pretty-ugly’, though the meaning is more nuanced than that, denoting an unconventional or unique beauty. The idea that, even if someone or something did not adhere to the ‘conventional’ standard of beauty, there might still be something intrinsically beautiful there –beauty being in the eye of the beholder, after all.
I have lost track of the number of prized possessions that I started out thinking were slightly ugly or just plain weird, but which I then found I couldn’t stop thinking about and eventually ended up buying. Take the trio of wooden carved masks that take pride of place on my living-room mantelpiece. I scrolled past them on a vintage-interiors website, and my first reaction was that they looked vaguely demonic; the sort of artefact that might be hung up to ward off other, even more malign presences.
Still, I found myself returning to that listing, and the longer I looked, the more compelling they became. (I was also charmed by the product description that noted they were ‘possibly cursed’.) I sought second and then third opinions, texting photos of them to friends with the question: ‘Are these good weird or bad weird?’ The responses were a mixture of clear disdain, nervous laughter and, in one case, naked fear. Yet the more people expressed their dislike for them, the more my love for them grew. Soon, I was carefully unwrapping a bubble-wrapped package and wandering around my flat, scouting where best to showcase them.
Similarly, it was not love at first sight with the Gabriela Hearst-era woven Chloé platforms I bought a few summers ago. Ditto my neon-orange and yellow Martine Rose x Nike Shox trainers, which are as divisive as they are eye catching (and are, in fact, the rare pair of shoes that get constant compliments from men rather than women – security guards, tradesmen and random men in the street have all praised my ‘football boots’, while outside of fashion circles, they’re met with the ‘sideways face’ emoji by my female acquaintances).
Shox MR4 x Martine Rose
In an age of algorithmically homogenised trends, of ‘clean-girl aesthetics’ and ‘quiet-luxury dupes’, I find myself drawn to things that others might deem visually unappealing, in an effort to avoid looking like an identikit mishmash of Instagram trends.
I’m not alone in this mindset; Balenciaga’s Demna Gvasalia and Jonathan Anderson, who turned Loewe and his eponymous label into desirable brands by subverting the expected, both create clothes that are, well, kind of weird. This season at Prada, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ collection – with its bug-eyed glasses, space-age hats, and traffic-cone-coloured anoraks thrown over feather- or sequin-adorned looks – was a commentary on the algorithm-driven era of endless information, Mrs Prada said, examining ‘the idea of choice, of unpredictability as a measure of human creativity’.
It-girl and fashion icon Alexa Chung has referred to seeking outa ‘fly in the ointment’ when dressing, describing bad taste as ‘kind of exciting’. Amy Smilovic, founder and creative director of womenswear brand Tibi (whose style philosophy has revolutionised the way I dress), coined a phrase I try to bear in mind when getting ready– that an outfit requires ‘the good ick’: a detail that introduces a little friction into proceedings, and more broadly encourages us to question and probe our notions of what constitutes ‘good taste’.
It takes skill to pull off those so-bad-it’s-good pieces, and for me, this is part of the appeal – anyone can make a pretty dress look good, but if you can do the same for something slightly unlovely, it speaks volumes about your innate stylishness. There is a satisfaction in rising to the challenge and making something that shouldn’t ‘work’, work. Those fashion victories feel hard won – they last.
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