A tomato handbag, a pair of quotation marks, a puppet show around a tote, a pair of pink sneakers dancing around a cappuccino. These are not just fashion items; they are semiotic puzzles, surreal provocations that circulate through Instagram posts, TikTok loops, starter pack collages. Somewhere between Duchamp’s readymades and the algorithm’s endless churn, luxury fashion has become fluent in absurdity — and its fluency is paying off.
Brands like Loewe, under the direction of Jonathan Anderson, have become masters of this dialect, turning the absurd into the aspirational. When a viral tweet compared an heirloom tomato to a Loewe bag — “This tomato is so Loewe I can’t explain it” — the brand responded not with indifference, but with production: a tomato-shaped clutch appeared on the runway the following season. Here, the meme doesn’t parody the brand; it becomes part of its generative ecosystem. Loewe absorbs the joke, reroutes it through its design language, and sells it back to the audience that created it.
One of the most influential early figures of this movement is Virgil. His use of irony and self-referential design at Off-White was, at times, too on the nose, but it tapped into something very real. Since then, Demna became the face of this meme-ification. The collabs with Lays and UPS were clearly made to be provocative and to circulate widely online.
This is not just about the luxury houses, of course. The new generation of Gen Z-founded brands, like Maison Rapito, Cowboys of Habit, and Namilia, are fluent in this economy of playful provocation. Each has had a moment or a some viral slogan pieces – Maison Rapito’s “Blowjobs Are Real Jobs”, Namilia’s corset emblazoned with “I ❤️ Ozempic”, and Cowboys of Habit’s “Save a horse ride a Cowboy” – prompting a success contingent on viral fluency. They design products that invite circulation, referencing the chaotic swirl of internet culture with a sharp wink. These items signal a layered literacy, a willingness to treat clothing as both self-expression and social media prop.
Yet perhaps the most striking shift is how the broader fashion dialogue has changed. Once, the conversation about style was controlled by elite editors and rarefied magazines. Today, it unfolds across meme pages, group chats, and TikTok feeds, driven by anonymous creators who mash up archetypes and subcultures into bite-sized, hyper-referential jokes. Accounts like @real_housewives_of_clapton, @nolitadirtbag, @socks_house_meeting, and @patheticfashion have become the unofficial chroniclers of fashion’s social life, using starter pack memes and satirical collages to map who’s wearing what, and why.
These meme accounts do not merely poke fun; they offer a form of cultural taxonomy. A grid of images — some Prada sunglasses, the Junya Watanabe x New Balance loafer-sneakers, a Le Creuset Cocotte, a Story MFG cardigan, a tin of Portuguese sardines, a bottle of orange wine with an ironically childish label — becomes a portrait of a social type. You DM it to your friend not because you want to mock them, but because you want them to know you see them, that you belong to the same cultural loop.
That’s maybe what’s most interesting about these pages: it’s circular, a self-referential system. It’s an inherently self-deprecating exercise because no one who isn’t one of these people would have the cultural vernacular to be able to understand all the touchstones of it – if you don’t believe me ask your mom or your most normie friend to explain it. Yet, it doesn’t necessarily read as mean-spirited or as trend-killing. It actually kind of exalts these specific items, trends, or restaurants by virtue of having them be placed alongside the IYKYK items people are meant to relate to. They claim to be hyperlocal, but through the homogenous nature of internet culture, they are pretty universal.
This, as the research suggests, represents a deeper shift: fashion has become more self-aware, more open to irony, more inclusive of voices that sit outside traditional gatekeeping structures. Meme accounts do not operate as influencers in the classic sense; they do not showcase their own faces or outfits, but instead offer a more democratic form of commentary. As Instagram’s Eva Chen put it, “everyone can feel like they’re part of this fashion industry subculture” when memes flatten the hierarchies of taste.
Retailers and brands are increasingly aware of this dynamic. Ssense, for example, has become adept at feeding products into the meme ecosystem, knowing that inclusion in a viral post can drive as much engagement (and sales) as a glossy editorial spread. On Ssense’s website and social media channels, one finds editorial features that blur the lines between product showcase and internet commentary, styling irreverence and irony directly into their visual language.
Further, on TikTok, you have brands like LOEWE producing videos referring to Italian brainrot characters, or Marc Jacobs partnering with a vast array of content creators to produce humorous skits and sketches. Interestingly though, it’s not like the clothing produced by Marc Jacobs and Loewe are necessarily overtly campy or funny – sure there’s some self-referential irony with the “TOTE BAG” bag and some surrealist imagery with the cracked egg heel, but by-and-large they’re not – which is to say, this absurdity and memetic appeal are meant to signal a cultural awareness by the brand, not to be a reflection of the thought-process behind the clothing.
But what does it mean when the absurd becomes profitable? Dada once sought to disrupt bourgeois aesthetics with shock, nonsense, and anti-art. Today, the nonsense has been monetized. The pigeon clutch sells out. The Ozempic tanktop walks the runway. The starter pack becomes a marketing deck. Is this the triumph of irony, or its exhaustion?
There is something melancholy in watching fashion’s surreal gestures fold so seamlessly into the logic of the market. Absurdity no longer destabilizes; it animates engagement metrics. The Balenciaga chip bag, once a provocation, now operates as content engineered for circulation. The joke doesn’t subvert consumption; it accelerates it.
None of this is new, of course. If you were on Twitter during the 2010’s you probably encountered official corporate accounts, who tried doing the same thing. Wendy’s and Denny’s got pretty popular, and the floodgates were opened for all sorts of brands from Tampax to Weetabix trying to create jokes, hop on trends, and reference popular memes. For a while, they were seen as kind of charming, but the joke quickly got old, prompting the (in my opinion) classic meme “Silence Brand”.
And yet, within this newer ecosystem in the fashion sphere, there remains a kind of collective play, a shared authorship of meaning. It’s more collaborative, more insightful, and more tactful. When a meme account assembles a collage of images it captures not just products, but the social feelings attached to them. When bigger brands produce memetic content, it’s often in association with well-liked creators with their own communities (if not directly user-generated content). The joke, when it lands, creates recognition: I know this person, I’ve seen this type, I am (or was, or want to be) part of this aesthetic script.
Fashion has always been about surfaces, but today those surfaces are layered with screens, captions, and codes. To participate in fashion now is to participate in its memetic life — to know not just the item, but the discourse around the item, the remixing and reframing that gives it cultural weight. We are all part of the feedback loop, both object and observer, tagging and being tagged, reframing and being reframed.
In the end, perhaps the most surreal part of all this is not the tomato bag or the pigeon clutch or the irony-drenched tanktop, but the simple fact that we keep laughing. That in an economy where even absurdity sells, we still find — or invent — spaces for shared recognition, for fleeting moments of collective self-mockery, for a kind of digital kinship forged in the absurd. If fashion today resembles anything, it is perhaps the exquisite corpse: a collaborative, contingent assembly, part joke, part portrait, part dream. Meaning slips, multiplies, dissolves. But somewhere in the slip, we find ourselves.
