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Last week, the internet was abuzz over British-Italian luxury brand Jordanluca’s “pee stained” jeans. First debuting on the brand’s Fall/Winter 2023 runway, Jordanluca’s controversial jeans suddenly became a hot topic online after they were accidentally featured in the New York Post on April 26. Soon after, they became global news, making headlines on TMZ, the Daily Mail, and on daytime TV shows.
The jeans, designed to look like the wearer had wet themselves, elicited a range of reactions, from anger to disgust to confusion. “Why would anyone wear these?” critics blasted, complaining about the $800 price tag. Others were intrigued. In the days that followed, traffic to JordanLuca’s site increased by more than 1,000 percent, and the remaining 70 percent of the jeans in stock sold out.
Word of mouth has helped sales soar, but for the JordanLuca duo (the label was founded in 2018 by Jordan Bowen and Luca Marchetto), the jeans weren’t meant to be a bestseller so much as a continuation of their house code of eccentricity: Despite tons of requests, they decided not to produce any more pairs or capitalize on the buzz on social media.[The jeans are] “This is about what fetishism really is,” JordanLuca co-founder Bowen says, but in the ensuing uproar, co-founder Marchetto adds that it’s now also a commentary on capitalist fetishism.
“The jeans are a comment on the fact that we don’t really need clothes, but have an obsessive attachment to them,” Marquette says. “Consumerism is a dirty fetish. We don’t buy things because we need them, we buy them because they stimulate emotions.” He acknowledges that Jordanluca is now “part of this spiral of viral consumerism,” which is why he decided not to reissue the jeans.
Some of fashion’s biggest successes of the past decade have followed this strategy, creating wacky, ridiculous, meme-worthy clothes that criticize capitalist culture while ironically boosting sales for luxury brands and conglomerates. Jordanluca is testament to the fact that, despite the recent rise and fall of trends, consumers remain perennially fascinated by capitalist gimmicks, provided they are packaged properly.
The concept was arguably born from Vetements, the luxury ready-to-wear label founded in 2014 by Georgian designers Demna and Guram Gvasalia. The label shocked the industry with its subversive takes on mundane wardrobe staples like DHL worker tops, oversized hoodies bearing consumerist logos, and tacky dad sneakers. Most famously, the brothers staged an “anti-capitalism” SS20 show at a McDonald’s on the Champs-Élysées; models wore “Hello I am Capitalism” T-shirts (which later sold for $600) and attendees were given a menu with two courses named “Kapitalism” and “Global Mind Fuck.”
