Fashion Is Eating Itself: Why People Are Wearing Their Clothes ‘Wrong’

Men’s shirts as skirts. Blouses tied into strapless tops. Pants as scarves. Wearing your clothes ‘wrong’ might sound like a hack from a five-minute craft video, but these looks are turning up on runways and street style roundups from Fashion Weeks across the world. In fact, ‘misworn’ clothing was one of the most iconic fashion looks of the entire year, although this detail flew largely under the radar.

In Charli xcx’s video for Guess (and that smouldering photo of her and Billie Eilish that was everywhere), Charli wears a skirt made from a repurposed nightdress by cult Parisian label All-In Studios, in what was arguably the most recognisable look of the entire BRAT era. And just last month, the pop star doubled down on misworn clothing in her party 4 u video with another All-In piece: a dress stitched together from polka-dot foulard scarves. It’s the fashion equivalent of the BRAT remix album: it’s a dress and it’s completely different but it’s also still a dress.

But how did miswearing your clothes go from a DIY gimmick to a serious sartorial power move? It’s a trend that’s part of a larger cultural shift away from hyper-curated, cohesive aesthetics and towards a particular brand of chaotic messiness. This transition has been fuelled by our drift into post-irony, as well as a growing exhaustion with consuming the endless churn of aesthetics being pushed onto our feeds.

We’ve seen this shift towards chaos in the rise of ‘ugly’ fashion (like Crocs) and intentionally mismatched outfits like TikTok’s viral ‘wrong shoe theory’. There’s a kind of anti-logic that’s been shaping the way we dress, and lately, it feels like fashion has entered a funhouse hall of mirrors. It’s not just that aesthetics are looping back on themselves, but everything looks a bit warped. Even proportions feel distorted, like the baggy jorts and knee-high boots combo that trended last summer. Things that are ‘off’ are ‘in’, and the culmination of this sartorial approach teeters wonderfully on the absurd: wearing your clothes wrong. 

This aesthetic of ‘misworn clothing’ has been playing out across the fashion world, with luxury label (and a stylist’s favourite) Hodakova taking the trend to the extreme in their Paris Spring/Summer 25 runway show (see: this trouser headpiece). And it’s not just niche designers leaning into the miswearing trend either — at Australian Fashion Week, Love Island’s Em Miguel-Leigh was spotted styling an oversized men’s polo slung around her hips as a makeshift skirt.

The upcycled ensembles sported by Charli xcx and others are more than just thrifty repurposing. These clothes deliberately subvert the original garment, with redundant sleeves, fastenings and design details that blur the line between function and form. Recontextualising is nothing new in couture — but now, fashion is subverting itself, cannibalising its own logic. Draw a Venn diagram of BRAT and Dadaism, and this is what you’ll find right in the centre.

“To be fashion, you actually have to be anti-fashion,” says Niamh Galea Dal Masetto of beloved Sydney label Ramp Tramp Tramp Stamp (RTTS), which counts Gabbriette among its fans. Niamh launched RTTS in 2018 and has since gained a cult following for her off-kilter designs that upcycle garments in creative, unexpected ways. 

One of Niamh’s early pieces — a harness top latticed with deadstock lingerie elastics — was created in response to a former workplace critiquing her for not wearing a bra. “I was determined to wear a bra as required, but in the least practical way possible [and] for it to not achieve anything they wanted … That experience led me to thinking about subverting the meaning of clothing.”

This rebellious and playful approach shines through RTTS’s designs, and it’s little wonder the brand’s been embraced by the young creative crowd. “There's so much obsession with looking ‘good’ or looking ‘right’,” Niamh says. “Sometimes, it’s pretty freeing to just allow yourself not to”.

That attitude — of not just being okay with looking imperfect, but aestheticising it — is exactly why misworn clothing is having its moment. This shift tracks with the rise of post-irony more broadly in our culture: you only have to compare today’s ‘unfiltered’ Instagram photo dumps to the millennial earnestness of 2010s Insta to see just how much our self-expression is shaped by a reflexive kind of self-awareness. And in this hyper-referential landscape — where it’s impossible to consume anything without witnessing our own consumption of it — it makes sense that fashion is folding in on itself, collapsing under the weight of its own irony.

And perhaps we’ve just about run out of aesthetics to consume altogether. With the TikTok-ification of style, it feels like we’ve sped-run every subculture of the last century, hollowed them out to wear their hides, only to toss them a week later. The flood of ‘cores’ has become so intense, it’s starting to erode meaning altogether (tomato girl??). And as Niamh points out, it’s chipping away at personal style, too: “You can go on TikTok, type any designer's name, and you’ll find a video of someone telling you how to dress like a Miu Miu girl or a Chopova Lowena girl — and you can achieve it.”

It tracks that the next trend isn’t another aesthetic — it’s an anti-aesthetic. Instead of following another set of rules, it’s about knowing how to break them. It’s a new language of cool that speaks in subversion, self-awareness and self-referentiality.

To subvert a piece of clothing you need three things: (A) The cultural fluency to know what it is you're subverting, (B) the imagination to rewrite the narrative and (C) the taste to pull it off. Subverting takes you from a trend-follower to an author, and that’s what makes it so stylistically compelling. It’s why the cargo capris you were flamed for in eighth grade are a hot commodity on Depop and why Bella Hadid can pull off almost anything. It’s not just that our aesthetic sensibilities towards an item have changed, it’s that we have the ability to recast its meaning.

So, does that mean you can just grab anything from your closet, wear it totally wrong, call it subversive post-ironic dressing and expect to end up on a best-dressed list? According to Niamh, “It all comes down to intention.” Meaning, it’s not just what you wear — it’s how you wear it, and whether you’re aware of what you’re doing. 

But if you don’t quite manage to pull it off? That’s fine, too. “Maybe you are aiming for ridiculousness. It’s quite fascinating to dress ridiculously, which I do every now and then … sometimes the most wonderful thing is to get comfortable with not looking ‘good’."

If current fashion logic is anything to go by, the concept of ‘good’ might become redundant altogether — just like the sleeves on a shirt-skirt.