There is nothing more annoying than fashion appropriating something from a specific culture and re-vomiting it on the runways in a cold and detached way.
Take the blanket. Different populations all over the world employ blankets to protect themselves from harsh weather conditions or for ceremonial purposes. Some of you may remember the wool blankets embellished with mother-of-pearl buttons and donned by the Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast as capes, or the blankets covered with symbolic motifs and employed as tokens of cultural identification in special rituals and occasions by the Basotho people in South Africa.
Donned in the past by bohemian fashionistas over coats and jackets to prove how relaxedly cool they were, in more recent years the tribal blanket has assumed a different meaning identifying tribes of logo/brand adoring fans. Branded blanket-like scarves, light blankets and plaids are indeed popular and functional runway gifts given during catwalk show presentations to prevent the guests from getting cold while watching the show.
Rather than ending up on eBay, such items have been quite often reused after the catwalk shows as comfort blankets or as "hunting trophies" ("I'm wearing it, so I was there and you weren't!") by a bunch of desperate fashionistas (the blankets/scarves at Kenzo events were often re-used for such annoying purposes...).
Emboldened by such silly trophies, in some cases quite a few of the above-mentioned fashionistas managed (obviously unbeknownst to them...) to achieve a strange resemblance with the hooded Marty Feldman in Frankenstein Junior (View this photo) especially after a certain time/in certain conditions of light and after catwalk fatigue took over.
The curse of the blanket look started on the Louis Vuitton menswear Autumn/Winter 2012-13 runway with a couple of coats cut from a Vuitton travel blanket, but stretched into the fahsion house's Autumn/Winter 2014 menswear collection with double-face cashmere coats with blanket-like stripes running around the edges that called to mind traditional Chilean costumes.
This week blankets reappeared on Burberry Prorsum's runway during London Fashion Week. Christopher Bailey's "Bloomsbury Girls" (a twist on the Bloomsbury Group comprising Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and Virginia Woolf) donned shearlings, jackets and trench coats covered in hand-drawn blooming and blossoming flowers and foliage.
Some languid looks were accessorised with wool and cashmere blankets in stripes/geometric patterns and colours going from pastel pink to olive green and turquoise. The models wore them as blanket shawls, hinting at Virginia Woolf but also at the relaxed style of the Bloomsbury Group's country retreat at Charleston, East Sussex.
The stellar cast of models in the finale (Cara Delevingne, Jourdan Dunn and Edie Campbell among the others) also donned blankets personalised with their initials (the next self-aggrandisement step for the blanket worshipping fashion-victim egomaniac).
And so happened that the blanket - an otherwise terribly impractical item especially on public means of transport (try to catch a train/the underground/a bus while the blanket unwraps...) - is now a criminal accessory, a must for boho hipters, an item calling to mind the romantically happy domestic cosiness that exists in our troubled times only for a fraction of the entire global population.
A final note for all those of you who may find unnerving the fact that the tribal blanket has now turned into the c***ish blanket: before you start a global petition against blankets, please bear in mind that - as Lucy of Peanuts fame teaches us - there is still something you can do to stop the plague of the "blanketed fashionista". But,remember, act NOW, before it's too late.
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