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Marion Prost 

May 30th, 2026

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If it’s not the name, is it the jacket? But the name, as it turns out, has Bourdieu, Walton, and Barthes all agreeing it was never really about the jacket. 

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One clown is one clown. Two clowns are two clowns. Ten thousand clowns become difficult to criticize without sounding under-read. Is that the new way of fashion? A piece survives long enough, gets photographed enough, cited and archived enough, and eventually, your dislike starts to feel embarrassingly literal. You see a piece, you hate it, then you learn it’s archive Chanel and suddenly you begin approaching it with the caution usually reserved for contemporary art and natural wine. Is this taste? Is this growth? Is this just Bourdieu’s worst nightmare?

 

Pierre Bourdieu, the same man who turned “you just think you like that” into a 600-page academic event, had a word for this, and it wasn’t flattering. In “Distinction” (1979), he argued that taste is never innocent, never personal, never the pure, disinterested response Kant spent decades insisting it was. It’s cultural capital doing what cultural capital does: performing. Knowing that a jacket is archivally significant isn’t necessary sensitivity. It’s class reproduction with a press release. The habitus doesn’t encounter the garment. It encounters a signal. Files it accordingly. Feels smug about it later at dinner. Or so he says.