Top Runway Faux Pas

At Berlin’s recent Fashion Week, a designer made a major misstep by depicting homeless people on the catwalk. Ana Finel Honigman on the worst fashion “statements” of all time.

Fashion can contain layers of literary, symbolic, and political meaning. The question is whether fashion is like an onion or an artichoke: Peel away the layers and is there a heart? And is it in the right place? While perversions of all kind are common to see on catwalks, political statements are rarer and more risky. Here are 10 designers who mixed style and strong statements (or at least tried to and failed), or were too isolated in fashion's often insular world to realize that their lovely designs were getting tangled up in reality.

1. Berlin-based designer Patrick Mohr recently sent out the homeless sellers of the Strassenfeger magazine (Berlin's The Big Issue) alongside professional models for his collection during Mercedes Benz's Berlin Fashion Week in July. All the models navigated a catwalk covered in black trash bags, with their faces caked in mouldy green mud (remember Zoolander’s “Derelict” show, anyone?). But the pretty models wore jeans and the homeless participants were dressed in ill-formed sacks like creatures from a children's theatrical performance. Mohr claimed he wanted to let the homeless models "take part in a world usually inaccessible to them." Maybe next season he could design nice suits for them and take them to a luxe dinner.

AP Photo

2. Two years before offending some sensibilities by lowering trousers to show derriere-cleavage and elevating the "builders' bum" to high fashion, British enfant terrible Alexander McQueen attacked more traditional cleavage in his S/S 93 Nihilism student show at Central Saint Martins. There, he covered models' breasts in fake blood and wrapped their bodies completely in plastic wrap. McQueen's muses were the deformed mutant mannequins created by the famed London artists known as the Chapman Brothers, but to a few too many in the audience what they evoked were mastectomies. McQueen's earlier Highland Rape show, a rant against Brit injustice in Scotland, was paradoxically perceived as gorgeous but historically a bit prickly.