BigShinyThing

Not quite up there with Elle Decoration’s ’soweto chic’ article from 2002 - sample text:

Stricken by apartheid, Soweto’s townships were once a feared part of Johannesburg. Now they’re a source of dynamic design. Time to ditch the leopard-print clichés, we think.

But still, looks like the ‘poor people are so damn stylish’ fashion angle has made an unwelcome return.

In an article about the very un-fat and un-poor olsen twins’ prediliction for baggy clothing, the New York Times writes:

The new look has acquired a name: Bobo style. "You know, bohemian bourgeois," explained Kathryn Neal, 28, a freelance writer in New York, who is partial to billowing Alexander McQueen pirate shirts worn with beat-up jeans. "Bobo" is borrowed from the title of a five-year-old work of pop sociology, "Bobos in Paradise" by David Brooks, now an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. He used the term to describe a breed of well-heeled consumers who bashed materialism while embracing all manner of luxury.

Lauren Stover, the author of "Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide to Living on the Edge" (Bulfinch Press, 2004), has noticed the trend, which has cropped up in moneyed communities from Beverly Hills to the Upper West Side, where young women wear grandma’s crocheted shawl, moth-eaten cashmere sweaters and scuffed cowboy boots. "It’s perfectly fine to look like a bag lady," Ms. Stover said.

My favourite bit:

People are tapped out on luxury," said Thakoon Panichgul, a young designer who incorporated bohemian frayed hems and disintegrating brocades in the collection for fall 2005 that he showed in New York last month. "We need to reinvent luxury in a more surprising way," he added, or at least treat it irreverently. He mentioned how Miuccia Prada once memorably wore her diamond necklace inside out to show off the backs of the stones. "That was subversive," Mr. Panichgul said, "It made you question the whole concept of luxury.”

See also Zoe Williams writing in The Guardian in 2002 on poverty chic .

Nicked from post on gawker.com.