Poor chic. Estetyka ubóstwa w modzie epoki postindustrialnej

Fashion embodies the paradoxes of the contemporary world; its relations with poverty have been fairly perplexing for a long time. The author considers haute couture’s romance with the aesthetics of poverty since the emergence ofmodern capitalist society. She devotes particular attention to the period at the turn of the 20th to 21st centuries, when major social, economic, and cultural transformations brought changes to the fashion world. The first aim of the article is to show fashion’s aesthetic revolution, which was initiated by avant-garde designers in the 1980s and 1990s. Its second is to describe the structural changes that led to a blurring of categories in the fashion system over the past two decades. And its final, most important aim is to present fashion’s popular aesthetic of poverty and to interpret the significance of ‘poor chic’ in contemporary post-industrial society