HOUSE OF CHAOS
“To what extent has fashion's appropriation of subcultural aesthetics severed those subcultures from their ideological function — and what does a practice-based critical response reveal about the possibilities of reclamation?”
SCROLL
01 / THE BRIEF
Subcultural Politics on the Runway
House of Chaos began with a single observation: that punk, goth, and rave were everywhere on S/S 2024 luxury runways and nowhere in the room. The aesthetic had travelled; the ideology had not. This project is a critical dissertation and fashion film script examining how fashion strips subcultures of their politics on the way to the runway — grounded in Hebdige, Thornton, Bauman and Muggleton, and tested against original primary research.
02 / VISUAL ARCHIVE
Archival Bricolage & Editorial Studies
03 / THE THINKING
When Style Becomes Spectacle
Subcultures don't appear out of nowhere — they arise when a group of people feel actively refused, excluded, and unrepresented, and use style as a form of communication. Fashion took the safety pins, the baggy silhouettes, the black clothing — but left the ideology behind. The project argues this is a one-way process: once a subculture becomes spectacle, the oppositional energy that produced it cannot be recovered. The sign survives; what it was saying does not.
01 / SUBCULTURE
PUNK
Refusal as Language
Bricolage and refusal, incorporated into luxury embellishment.
02 / SUBCULTURE
GOTH
Mortality as Identity
A philosophical confrontation with death, absorbed into dark aestheticisation.
03 / SUBCULTURE
RAVE
The Politics of Collective Joy
Collective anonymity, reversed into individual, photographed commodity.
PRIMARY RESEARCH / EMPIRICAL DATA
Key Findings & Industry Survey
63%
of survey respondents said luxury punk-referencing garments feel hollow or inauthentic.
78%
agreed social media has dramatically accelerated how fast subcultural style gets absorbed by mainstream fashion.
27+2
27 respondents, 2 original industry interviews, grounded in Hebdige's 1979 theory of incorporation.
04 / THE FILM
Sound, Duration, Movement
Fashion took the aesthetic but not the argument — so the creative response had to exist in the same register the subcultures did: sound, duration, movement. House of Chaos includes a non-linear fashion film script and shot treatment, structured around three ideological registers — refusal, interiority, and collectivity — refusing the polished, algorithm-optimised fashion image on principle, not by accident.
NON-LINEAR TREATMENT / SCENE 03: REFUSAL & COLLECTIVITY
05 / THE OUTCOME
Strategic Rigor Meets Directorial Vision
House of Chaos demonstrates the ability to hold a critical argument across both written and creative registers — academic rigor paired with original primary research, translated into a distinct visual and directorial point of view. It's the clearest evidence in this portfolio of strategic thinking married to creative execution.