One cold, bright January morning at the beginning of 2023, a chauffeured car pulled up to the marble steps of the Petit Palais in Paris, and Kylie Jenner – lip-gloss mogul and scion of the Kardashian dynasty – emerged. For that morning’s Schiaparelli catwalk show, Jenner was wearing a strapless, black velvet, floor-length gown, with a lifesize lion’s head crafted from foam, silk and fake fur on one shoulder. It was so realistic that many observers took it to be taxidermy. Many animal rights activists thought the look insensitive. The waiting photographers, presented with a moment of pure street theatre, lapped it up. Some of us just wondered whether she had covered herself in glue and run through the London zoo gift shop. Everyone agreed it was in bad taste; everyone also agreed it was, in its own way, sort of brilliant.
Good taste is old hat. Coco Chanel’s famed formula for elegance – before leaving the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off – has no place in a 21st-century media strategy. You can’t break the internet without breaking eggs. On the red carpet, at fancy parties, on the front row – the platforms where the best-dressed once duelled in little black dresses, competing to be the last word in understated perfection – dressing up has become fancy-dress adjacent. The singer Sam Smith wore inflatable black latex – half Leigh Bowery, half Marvel superhero – at this year’s Brit Awards. The actor Jared Leto appeared in full costume as Karl Lagerfeld’s cat, Choupette, at the Met Gala.
