The ‘fashion month’ of February is almost over. Designers from around the world have descended on London, Milan and New York to show off their Autumn/Winter 2017 collections, with Paris happening this week.

We’ve seen everything from the magnificent, proudly delivered by Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana, to the ridiculous, courtesy of Moschino and Christopher Kane. When luxury labels send absurd creations down the catwalk, it’s interesting to consider whether high fashion ought to be practical, desirable, or even a piece of wearable social commentary. Different designers are aiming to tick different boxes.

"There were dresses made out of rubber gloves, bubble wrap and food wrappers. They were all surprisingly well executed, if with a hint of a Year Nine textiles project."

Christopher Kane is a repeat offender of pairing beautiful clothes with hideous footwear. Last year he sent marble-print crocs down the catwalk, and this year they returned in a fur-lined edition. Kane says he likes to use “unexpected items” in his collections, and for sure, no one expected the foam-formed, ventilated ‘it-shoe’ of yesteryear to be worn as a legitimate statement piece. Crocs are comfortable and practical (so I’m told), and they are favoured by doctors and nurses for hygiene reasons, but conventional haute couture they most certainly are not. Neither are the high heels inlaid with sponge, the other shoe of choice for Kane. Admittedly the sponge probably helped to ease the pain of the stilettos, which would probably otherwise have been cripplingly painful to walk in, but I doubt this was his reason for doing so. It’s hard to imagine the high street imitating these bizarre creations in time for autumn, but that these shoes were ugly is a point in itself.

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Unpredictability is good, as is subjective beauty (even Crocs are beautiful to some). Would tongues be wagging if Kane had paired his delicate florals and feminine cuts with classic heels? Probably not: if nothing else, he got himself noticed, and told the world that shoes don’t have to be beautiful if you don’t want them to be.

Over at Moschino, there were dresses made out of rubber gloves, bubble wrap and food wrappers. They were all surprisingly well executed, if with a hint of a Year Nine textiles project. Using a bike wheel, a dustbin lid and a cardboard box as headpieces was strikingly similar to something Alexander McQueen did back in 2009, although Moschino seemed to be using these in a more ironic way to make a statement about consumer culture. The Italian fashion house was not suggesting that we parade through everyday life dressed in a hoard of Quality Street wrappers and empty soup cans, but rather that we think about the potential before discarding goods and about the waste we generate as a material culture.

At Preen by Thornton Bregazzi, lipstick was deliberately applied to make the models appear ‘post-snog’. It was an appropriate choice, perhaps, for a collection which also included duvets as legit outfits, but one that most of us would only ever wear by accident after one of those spontaneous encounters in Sunday Life.

There were two positives to come out of this cosmetic creation, though, the first being that if your makeup is smudged all over your face when you leave the house, making out with someone else can only add to the effect. The second is perhaps one of sexual empowerment: go ahead and kiss who you want. Never be ashamed. 

Subversive fashion is still fashion nonetheless. Just because collections are not explicitly hating on Trump (which was, by the way, the thing for designers to be doing this fashion month) or making pretty garments fit for a princess, that doesn’t mean they are irrelevant.

The more attention-grabbing or abstract clothing is, the more it can be individually interpreted by the audience. I could be viewing the intentions of the designers above completely wrongly, but at least I am thinking about it. Forgettable collections are useless. It’s better to be outrageous and get noticed for it