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Trashy taste is tearing up our runways and sidewalks
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By Andrea Peyser
July 8, 2016

Trashy taste is tearing up our runways and sidewalks

Call it Homeless Chic, Ugly-Ass Couture, Rags-Aplenty or the unfortunate result of Dressing While Drunk. Any way you rip it, this fashion trend is as hideous as it is contagious.

And I mean no offense to well-dressed street people. Drunks, too. But on runways and at A-list fetes, on stages, sidewalks, in hot nightclubs and cookie-cutter shopping malls from New York City to Hollywood, Paris, Milan and Des Moines, Iowa, everyone from rich and gullible celebs to tiresome millennials — even some of their parents — is exhibiting signs of sartorial dementia.

Torn jeans, often waging desperate battles to hang on to random butts by single and unreliable threads, are the new black. Whether squeezing in plus-size, middle-American hips or bony, anorexic urban bums, these trousers amount to a mass form of insanity that makes me want to lock up my teenage daughter until retirement age.

When I was a kid, my friends and I distressed our $12 blue jeans the old-fashioned way — with obsessive machine washings, copious splashes of bleach and even well-placed gashes inflicted with razor blades — and we had the good sense to hide our creepy creations from disapproving Moms and Dads.

Now, Daddy Kanye West is sticking his well-used middle finger into the face of classic notions of taste.

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Kanye WestPhoto: Getty Images
The rap mogul staged a ridiculous rebellion, or displayed his lack of a full-length mirror, by strutting on the red carpet at the Met Gala in Manhattan in May wearing a pearl-encrusted jacket, white undershirt — and a pair of tragic dungarees exposing an unclad thigh and a bare knee, flirting with a XXX-rating. This likely drove Vogue magazine editrix Anna Wintour, who presides over the annual event, to the corner bar.

It was not only visually gross and likely unsanitary, but Kanye proved there’s a correlation between money and the naked emperor lurking amid the holes.

For Kanye seemed oblivious to the fact that his evaporating denims, made by the hot Los Angeles cult label Fear of God, sell for the staggering sum of $895!

“Money can’t buy class or style, you are born with it,’’ New York City-based celebrity stylist Oksana Pidhoreckyj told me. “Hobo chic for daywear is fun but hobo chic for evening events is trashy and not appropriate. If you can afford to buy a ripped pair of jeans for $900 then you should seriously re-evaluate your life.’’

But am I the lowly peasant to defy the awesome cultural influence of the celebrity industrial complex? Am I the fool to cut through the epic narcissism of trashy Kim Kardashian West?

Maybe I should inform Kanye’s missus, who’s displayed a willingness to clothe her often-bare, cartoonish body in garments that my own mom would have deemed too ratty to donate to Goodwill, that she’s succumbed to a wicked case of the uglies.

I’d like to let pop runt Justin Bieber know that asking Fear of God designer Jerry Lorenzo to create overpriced “Japanese selvedge denim’’ stagewear for his concert tour won’t add to his street cred.

It makes him and his performers look even more girlish. Or not.

Nasty pants might be the least of our worries.

Models at Malaysian designer Moto Guo’s show at Milan Men’s Fashion Week in Italy last month strutted the runway — with faces covered with acne, promoting the perceived beauty of zits!

Are we to believe that pimples are in, clear visages are so 2015?

I need to lie down in a vat of Proactiv.

Someone, please — make it stop!

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