Who Wore It First?

If you’ve ever seen The Devil Wears Prada, you already know the cerulean speech. Miranda Priestly stands there, and without a stutter, explains to Andy that the sad blue sweater she pulled out of a clearance bin actually started years earlier on a runway before getting filtered down through department stores until it landed in front of her. What Miranda so eloquently described there is trickle-down fashion theory, which is the idea that trends are born at the top with designers and the very wealthy, then slowly work their way down to the rest of us in cheaper, watered-down versions.

For a long time that was pretty much our understanding for how trends happened. But sometimes fashion works in the complete opposite direction, there is just no iconic movie monologue about it yet. The trickle-up theory, sometimes called the bubble-up theory, was coined in 1970 by George Field, it says that a lot of fashion’s biggest moments never touched a runway first. They came out of the streets, out of the workplaces, out of subcultures made up of people the fashion industry was actively ignoring, and only later did the luxury houses come after them.

Denim

Denim started as workwear. It was built to survive hard labor and absolutely not be something cute, and for a long time that was the whole point, you wore it because your job required it. However, that changed when the great depression hit and suddenly half the country was doing hard labor to get by. A fabric that had only ever been a uniform for miners, farmers, and hard laborers turned into something much bigger, a symbol of resilience and honest work that people started wearing with actual pride. Denim has been doing that ever since, picking up a new meaning every time the economy takes a hit. It happened again after the 2008 recession, when raw undone denim showed up all over the runways as designers pivoted away from excess and toward clothes that actually felt practical. Somewhere between the mines and the modern mall it also became a symbol of Y2K fashion, and I don’t think we can talk about that without mentioning Britney and Justin at the 2001 AMAs in head-to-toe denim, a look so iconic that people are still referencing it more than twenty years later.

But now that denim has found itself on multiple runways, it begs the question, how much would you pay for a pair of jeans?

Punk

Punk fashion came out of British working-class frustration in the late 70s, and a lot of it was only DIY out of pure necessity. Punks shopped secondhand, tore their clothes apart to remake them, and covered leather jackets in studs, safety pins, and hand-painted slogans that were specifically designed to horrify anyone over the age of thirty. The punk aesthetic was never about looking good, it was about making a point.

But things started to change when Vivienne Westwood brought the look to her runway debut in 1981, and while she gets credit for popularizing punk she definitely didn’t invent it, the British youth did. By the time the Met Gala did “Punk: Chaos to Couture” in 2013, celebrities were showing up in five-figure versions of a look invented by teenagers who genuinely could not afford new clothes.

The irony definitely went over their heads.

Dapper Dan

Harlem New York 1982, on 125th street is where one of the best stories of trickle-up fashion was born. Dapper Dan opened his boutique in Harlem, about 60 blocks up from the iconic Fifth and Madison, where luxury seemed to live in New York. So how does a shop 60 blocks north of Fifth Avenue end up defining what luxury looked like for a decade? Well contrary to what the name “King of Knock-offs” suggests, he wasn’t just imitating luxury, he was reconstructing it for people it was never made for. He took various luxury monograms and reworked them into oversized, made-to-order pieces built for how his clients actually wanted to dress. LL Cool J wore him. Floyd Mayweather wore him. Eric B. & Rakim wore him. Salt-N-Pepa wore him. Rappers, athletes, and cultural icons all wore him.

Dan was credited for starting what was later coined as logomania. Before him, a logo was something small and quiet, tucked on a pocket or stitched inside a lining, a little signal for people already in the club. But Dan blew them up and made them the entire garment, and the houses hated it — right up until they started doing it themselves. Fendi’s response was to raid his shop, and it sadly closed in 1992. That was supposed to be the end of his story. Then in 2017 Gucci showed a look that was unmistakably his, got publicly called out for it, and turned around and financed an atelier for him on Lenox Avenue the following year. He went from knock-off king to collaborator without changing a thing about what he was doing or who he was.