A city's down-and-outs can be so terribly inspiring - just ask Xi Li Ge.
BY David Nicholls | 28 September 2010
Several years ago a coffee table book featuring photographs of South African slum dwellers' homes received a mixed response: was it celebrating creativity in the face of adversity or simply glamorising poverty? Perhaps the clue was in its title. The not at all patronising 'Shack Chick' was jam packed with inspiring interiors by those plucky South African peasants.
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We find ourselves faced with similar questions this season as the term Homeless Chic begins to bed down in our fashion vernacular. It begins with the story of a man named Xi Li Ge who was photographed by an amateur photographer on the streets of Ningbo, east China last year. His cheekbones were sharp enough to slice carrots, and he had the dark, brooding look that only a man thinking about where he might sleep safely that night might have.
Mr Ge soon became an Internet sensation known as Brother Sharp (and sometimes Beggar Prince or the Handsome Vagabond) and was named China's hottest homeless man (although not officially, of course). He was also hailed as a fashion icon for his inimitable flare for layering.
Around the same time, the menswear fashion shows for this autumn/winter were kicking off in Milan and - purely by coincidence you understand - a model walked out onto the D&G catwalk looking a little bit like... Brother Sharp. The model didn't look homeless; he looked as though he'd just stepped off the slopes in Gstaad. But the fact that the pair shared a penchant for padded clothing, jaunty belts and a blue-with-red-highlights colour palette, crystallised the idea that Brother Sharp was a true visionary.
One online disciple clarified that ''He doesn't really look like a beggar, more like a vagabond,' before subjecting his ensemble to a thorough assessment. 'The quality of [his] tops are all not bad, a down jacket, cotton jacket, even a leather jacket inside, and though they're a bit dirty, they're all in good condition, not the kind that beggars find from the trash". I'm quite sure that was some comfort to him as he rifled through bins for something to eat.
Back to men's fashion week in Milan, and we were presented with the Vivienne Westwood Man collection which included down-and-out models whose make-up imitated frostbite as they pushed shopping trolleys and carried rolled up mattresses down a runway covered in roughly taped together cardboard. The accompanying press release read that the designer had 'found inspiration in the roving vagrant whose daily get-up is a battle gear for the harsh weather conditions . . . Quilted bombers and snug hoodies also work well in keeping the vagrant warm.' Those clever roving vagrants.
The latest update in the Brother Sharp saga is that there is to be a movie about his life made. Filming is due to start this month and it could be aired as early as February 2011. But despite the strange and patronising attention he has received so far, and the rich seam of inspiration some designers and stylists seem to find in the idea of the down-and-out, one must hope that the movie tries to represent the reality of homelessness a little more accurately than say, Pretty Woman did with prostitution. Surely there's more of a story here than that of one vagrant's struggle to look fierce against the odds..
Who knows how this will be played out? Maybe Brother Sharp really will have a Hollywood ending and manage to commodify his own poverty in some strange Zoolander-esque parody of the fashion industry. He could launch his own fashion line. And - here's something to mull over - a fragrance. It looks as though there's a market for it.
Follow David Nicholls on Twitter: www.twitter.com/David__Nicholls
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