I kept postponing the Matières Fécales interview for Fashion Neurosis, even though it should have been the first thing I watched: everything they do — from their outward appearance to their way of thinking fashion as a form of cultural conflict — had already settled too deeply inside me. That is why the usual labels here feel not simply insufficient, but too small for what they are trying to describe. Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskar are not designers in the conventional sense; they work with the very system of looking that preemptively sorts bodies and faces into the permissible and the impermissible. What that system is used to calling “ugliness” ceases, in their work, to be a stigma and becomes material for form. They take someone else’s fear of otherness, push it into a sovereign, aggressive image, and send it back to the addressee. This is not simply fashion, but an intervention into the very way we look. If this appearance provokes immediate rejection, then it has already done its work: it has forced the boundary to reveal itself, the point at which taste turns out not to be a personal preference, but a learned system of prohibitions.
That is precisely why I did not want, for a long time, to translate this impression into explanation. As long as such an image remains silent, one can remain inside it: it operates before words, before biography, before the neat dissection into “trauma,” “aesthetic,” and personal history. But the conversation with Hannah and Steven did not destroy that silence; it made it heavier. Behind the visual obsession, what emerged was not a confession about “self-expression,” but a more uncomfortable construction: labor, poverty, disgust, discipline, production — and, most importantly, the price.
At one point, Hannah names the price of a blazer: 3,500 euros. And the point, of course, is not that such a price tag could come as news to the world of high fashion. There, what is sold is not fabric and buttons, but handwork, myth, archive, surname, a place in the museum, the fantasy of heritage, and that particular European air capable of turning meaninglessness into savoir-faire. Old luxury always has an alibi. Even if an object costs as much as a car, it is called craftsmanship. Even if it is impractical, it is called couture. Even if no one needs it, it is called culture.
Before that number, their biography could still have been placed inside a ready-made cultural case: religious upbringing, school uniform, fear of the body, upcycling, the kitchen where hoodies and T-shirts were sewn for ten years. Contemporary culture loves these narratives, provided they remain touching enough and poor enough. Trauma becomes style, repression becomes silhouette, trash becomes resourcefulness, poverty becomes proof of authenticity. All of this can be consumed almost without risk: as a beautiful story of overcoming, where the moral position has already been placed safely on the correct side.
And yet the awkwardness of that sum does not disappear. This is not the price of luxurious inaccessibility, but the price of painful possibility: high enough to remain an exception, close enough to begin functioning as desire. Not the mythic sum of old couture, but a perfectly real market threshold beyond which an image stops being free. Probably because this jacket is not being made by the heirs of proper luxury. It is being made by people whose brand name is almost a physiological spit in the face of gloss: Fecal Matter, Matières Fécales, Fekal’naya Materiya. Not a “maison,” not an “archive,” not “heritage,” not the noble continuity of craft, but material that culture is accustomed to pushing out of sight. It introduces into this language what is usually excluded from it: the low, the bodily, the recycled, the discarded, everything from which fashion draws its energy but prefers not to call by its name. It reminds us that matter is not only silken, but intestinal.
In the interview, Steven says that the very name of the brand was a way of arguing simultaneously with fashion’s wastefulness and with luxury’s glossy self-image; with that world which knows how to sell not so much clothing as a version of life already cleansed of anything that might betray its underside: waste, labor, sweat, shame, and the social awkwardness of matter. They do not add eccentricity to luxury; they return to it everything it usually excludes in order to appear immaculate.
As long as their practice looked like the romance of independent resistance, it easily fit into a familiar cultural scheme. They sewed everything themselves, worked with found materials, rejected fast fashion, turned trash into clothing and limitation into method. Such a biography is convenient to admire: poor, inventive, ethical, romantic enough to be consumed without internal conflict. Marginality in this form does not threaten luxury, because it remains a supplier of images, not a participant in the system of value. But the moment this same world acquires production, a factory, artisans, support from Dover Street Market, clients, shows, celebrities, and a retail price, the very optics change. What could once be loved as pure radicality enters the economy. Poverty stops being only a beautiful origin, upcycling only a moral gesture, and otherness only a free visual resource. The awkwardness arises not because Matières Fécales has betrayed its source, but because that source no longer agrees to remain a poor proof of authenticity.
This is where the most interesting conflict begins. The industry has long known how to draw energy from marginality: from clubs, from poverty, from queer culture, from bad taste, from trash, from bodies that were long denied the right to be beautiful. But usually that energy must pass through someone else’s system of legitimation before it can become expensive. Steven and Hannah do something else: they do not allow their origin to be transformed into a safe reference. They preserve for it the right to price, production, and the authority of form. So the question is not why their protest became a commodity. The question is why we become uneasy when marginality stops being merely material for someone else’s luxury and begins to participate in assigning its own value.
The image of Matières Fécales, as becomes clear in the interview, appeared long before the brand, the shows, and the Parisian fashion system: as a child, Steven was already drawing what they would eventually arrive at — a bald, androgynous, sensual woman. Before it became a body, this fantasy existed as a drawing, as an escape into imagination, because physically being that way was impossible. Then it became makeup, a shaved head, the absence of eyebrows, clothing, kitchen production. Now it has become a jacket with a price. When a homemade fantasy receives resources, it does not necessarily betray itself. Sometimes it stops being a request for the first time.
Here it is important not to fall into the opposite stupidity and declare expensiveness automatically moral. A 3,500-euro jacket does not become accessible because it was conceived by people with an experience of repression. It is inaccessible. It is elitist. It exists inside luxury. It will not be bought by the person who recognizes themselves in Steven’s religious trauma or Hannah’s school uniform, but by someone who can pay for rarity, image, and proximity to radicality. The market, in general, knows how to digest everything. Even that which arrived to insult it. Even the word “feces” can be printed on an invitation, placed next to champagne, sold through Dover Street Market, worn by Sarah Paulson, photographed, archived, evaluated. The market has long been selling protest to those who can afford a good-looking version of protest.
And yet it is difficult for the market to fully absorb this artistic organism. Their clothes resist the role of beautiful status object not because they stand outside luxury, but because inside it they retain too many discordant features. The name does not allow one to forget the materiality that luxury usually hides. The silhouette does not offer the wearer calm status. When Hannah says of the pink suit that there will be fewer than fifty of them and that not everyone will have the courage to wear that shoulder and that color, what one hears in the phrase is not only pride in a difficult form. There is almost a social test there. Money grants access to the object, but it does not guarantee the ability to withstand it. In old luxury, price functions as an automatic pass into someone else’s cultural code. With Matières Fécales, everything is less convenient. The price opens the door, but behind the door remains a form that may prove stronger than its owner.
But the interview leaves the price as a simple fact. It explains the origin of the awkwardness, but does not show it in action. For that, a show was required — the place where protest stops being conversation and becomes a live event, ritual, and desire. It was there that the price tag stopped being a characteristic of an object and became a question of my own complicity.
I was present at The One Percent, and for that reason it is difficult for me to write about Matières Fécales from the position of a noble outside observer. I did not study them as a phenomenon behind glass. I was inside the very machine they were dissecting: the show, the invitations, the light, the aching wait. The audience had come to watch a critique of wealth, one that unfolded within the framework of that same expensive ritual. This was where the central tension emerged: the challenge to the system was not being issued from outside, but from within its own mechanism. The One Percent was not simply a fashion show, although the clothes existed with such a degree of control and tension that the word “look” could no longer contain them. It was not a show in the usual sense, where the viewer retains the comfortable position of observer. This one percent operated differently: it did not allow you to watch the critique of wealth from the outside, because the situation of the show itself had already made the viewer part of the world being opened up. And here the first discomfort appeared: I felt good.
A show that, in theory, should have produced unease generated an almost euphoric impression. Not because it softened its cruelty, but because that cruelty was flawlessly organized. This was not a political idea placed over clothing as an explanation. It was an idea cut, sewn, staged, lit, and brought to the point of desire. Perhaps the most unpleasant effect of Matières Fécales lies precisely in this: they do not simply “expose” luxury; they make that exposure unbearably seductive. And at that point it becomes impossible to pretend to be innocent. Was I admiring protest, or the fact that protest had finally begun to look like power? Was I moved by the critique of wealth, or by the fact that this critique itself had begun to speak its language: rarity, staging, inaccessibility, immaculate form? At what point does the viewer become an accomplice? When they applaud? When they want the object? When they realize that the critique of the elite has become one of the season’s most desirable events?
Contemporary luxury has long since learned to applaud its own exposure. This may be its highest stage. It is capable of accepting an accusation as an invitation, an anatomical theater as a premiere, a spit as a new kind of shine. That is why The One Percent should not be read as a simple pamphlet on the theme “the rich are ugly.” Steven and Hannah are too precise for that cheap pleasure. What interests them is not the rich person as caricature, but the very aesthetics of domination: how power chooses a face, a posture, a material, a silhouette; how it decides whose body will be considered normal and whose will be considered a creature.
In one of their statements — not quoted verbatim — there is a formula that seems to be the key to everything: “Society sees us as creatures; we don’t see ourselves as creatures. People dehumanize what doesn’t fit in.” The world first turns a person into a monster, then demands that they be ashamed of that form. Their gesture is arranged in reverse: they return the imposed image of the alien creature to the space of high fashion no longer as a stigma, but as a sovereign form.
Their early collection was called The Other. This matters: The One Percent does not appear out of nowhere as a clever seasonal comment on wealth. It is a continuation of the same conversation about visibility, only pushed to its class limit. The other is not simply the one without money. The other is the one whose body is read without their consent. The one who is placed in advance inside the zone of the strange, the animal, the not quite human. The one permitted to be inspiring, but not determining. Desired, but not powerful. A reference, but not the author of the price.
In this sense, The One Percent is not only an economic formula. The one percent are not simply those who have money. They are those who have the right to determine what counts as reality. The right to a face. The right to proportion. The right to expensive meaninglessness. The right to be strange without being immediately sent into the category of creature. The right to turn private trauma into public style and receive not pity for it, but power. That is why the show could not be reduced to a straightforward critique of wealth. It was a fantasy of what wealth looks like after a curse. Not exposed wealth, which must now be ashamed and repent, but wealth pushed to its true physiognomy. Old luxury tries to look like a dream. Matières Fécales shows it as a system of exclusion.
The strongest effect of the show did not arise where one might most easily expect it: not in deformation and not in the rejection of familiar beauty. What is more frightening in Steven and Hannah’s work is the degree of control. Everything that might have fallen apart into chaos is gathered into a strict system. The repulsive is not smeared across the surface, but constructed; excess is subordinated to an internal logic, and deformation does not cancel couture precision, but makes it even more evident. There is no protest against good taste in their clothes. They do not arrive as disorder that can be dismissively written off as provocation, but as an alternative order — colder, more demanding, and perhaps more honest about the violence always hidden inside the very idea of immaculate form. That is why The One Percent does not ask for a reaction, as an ordinary provocation would. It acts more harshly: it places you in the room and makes you part of the mechanism. You look at a critique of money made in the language of money; you admire what was supposed to expose you; you feel awkwardness, but cannot renounce pleasure. This is the precision of the show: it does not resolve the contradiction, but refuses to let you leave it.
In the interview, this alien, almost depersonalized normality appears not as a biographical detail, but as a condition of tension: the less the surrounding space coincides with them, the more sharply the image is forced to intensify. They still need resistance against which form can sharpen itself. Freedom, in Steven’s words, is defiance. There has to be something standing in the way. Earlier, what stood in the way was religion, family, school uniform, poverty, lack of capital, the impossibility of being oneself. Now something else stands in the way: the possibility of being understood too well by the market. This is perhaps the most difficult stage for any radical artist. As long as you are not understood, you are protected by your own marginality. When people begin to understand you, buy you, invite you, archive you, and call you important, another form of pressure begins. Now you may not be destroyed, but absorbed. Not forbidden, but beautifully explained. Not expelled, but given a seat in the front row, where your gesture is transformed into a culturally acceptable image.
Matières Fécales is still resisting precisely this. They do not occupy a convenient external position in relation to the industry. Their gesture is more complex: they work with its tools, accept its rules of visibility and production, but do not allow it to fully swallow their own meaning. They work with the couture code, but return to it what is usually scrubbed out of it: shame, corporeality, class awkwardness, the experience of exclusion. They speak of pain, but do not ask for compassion. They make expensive things, but not things that are comfortable for status. They do not reject shine, but they do not apologize for the fact that shine gets dirty.
My own admiration for them is not innocent either. It would be too convenient to say: I am interested in their critique of luxury, their ethics, their struggle against the norm, their artistic wholeness. Yes, all of that. But I am interested in something else as well: the way they entered this industry on their own terms. I am interested in their revenge — not literal, not petty, not cruel, but aesthetic. The former object of someone else’s gaze becomes the one who organizes the gaze. The one who could have been called a creature now builds an entire system of creatures, and the fashion system comes to watch.
To read them as a story of personal liberation is to replace conflict with convenient morality. They are not interesting as an example of the idea that “everyone has the right to be themselves.” Yes, they do — but that is much too poor a conclusion for their work. Their gesture is far less humanistic and far less comfortable for the viewer. It shows that appearance is not a question of taste, but a field of power; that the body is either read for you, or you try to damage the alphabet; that wealth appropriates not only objects, but the parameters of reality: who is beautiful, who is human, who is worthy of visibility, who may be strange without becoming ridiculous. And if that answer now costs 3,500 euros, the problem is not only the price. The problem is that a feeling which was supposed to remain cheap, traumatic, and grateful for visibility has suddenly acquired form, a runway, a client, and the right to assign value.
Their radicality is measured not by the accessibility of the product, but by the autonomy of representation. The objects themselves remain inside the narrow economy of luxury, but their visual language already exists in general circulation: through shows, interviews, social media, celebrities, and their own bodies, which have long been more convincing than any advertising campaign. It is a strange, damaged kind of democracy: the object belongs to the few, the image to everyone. And yet it is precisely the price that prevents this story from becoming a beautiful tale of freedom. It returns the market, access, desire, and the awkward right of marginality to assign its own value back into the conversation. It does not remove the contradiction, justify it, or solve it — but it makes it honest. A 3,500-euro jacket remains inaccessible, elitist, built into the system of luxury. And at the same time, it refuses to be only a symbol, only a reference, only a free proof of authenticity.
That is why I define Matières Fécales as a relict entity. Not because they belong to the past, but because within them something has survived that contemporary culture organically cannot tolerate: wholeness, internal tension, and resistance to linear interpretation. They cannot be fully translated into the regime of instant consumption. This is a fundamental refusal to be immediately understandable, useful, or inclusive — a refusal to turn into safe content. They do not smooth their edges for the comfort of the industry, but neither do they imitate independence by pretending to exist outside its system. This is where their rare honesty lies: in functioning inside the system while fundamentally refusing to coincide with it.
So why does radical protest also seek to acquire a price tag?
Because it is tired of being a moral pauper. Because marginality is not obliged to go on proving its authenticity through the absence of money. Because hand labor has value. Because cheap clothing is too often cheap only for the buyer. Because an outsider can not only negate the system of luxury, but act within it while remaining faithful to themselves. Because the right to create an image remains incomplete if the right to assign it a price belongs to someone else.
But there is another, less comfortable answer. Protest wants to cost 3,500 euros because protest wants power too. Not only righteousness, visibility, sympathy, a place in the cultural program, but power — over the gaze, over the market, over desire, over what is considered valuable. As long as protest is poor, it can be loved as moral decoration. When it becomes expensive, it stops asking for our approval and starts issuing an invoice.
If the old bourgeois fantasy is allowed to be inaccessible, then the fecal fantasy has the right to its own markup. But Matières Fécales is not trying to turn dirt into gold — that would be much too old-fashioned an alchemy. They operate more precisely: they force conventional luxury to admit that its sterile shine has always been directly bound to displaced labor, corporeality, waste, and shame, to everything the industry so carefully leaves outside its shop windows.
