Heroin Chic Turns Young-Junkie Look Into High Fashion

The fashion industry thrives on the twitchy anticipation of style junkies searching for their next hit.

Fashion has gotten high on glamorous, buxom beauties and tripped on the vapid waif generation. Another thrill was the Lolita look with microkilts and shrunken sweaters. Now there are the current addictions: ‘70s redux, mod and a nihilistic vision of beauty that includes torn clothes and the wasted silhouettes and pinched faces of drug addicts.

Magazine readers have seen this gloomy look in the dark-rimmed vacant eyes of the Gucci models. Instead of the brazen strut of yesterday, catwalkers regularly adopt a slightly dazed, strung-out demeanor on the runway. More and more models are being photographed slouched in dingy bathrooms or cheap motels with their makeup smeared and their hair tousled. And while they’re decked out in the latest pricey designer fashions, the implication is that a hypodermic is somewhere just outside of the frame.

In March, when the British fashion collections were unveiled in London, the International Herald Tribune’s fashion reporter, Suzy Menkes, wrote: “Two movies are currently defining British society: ‘Trainspotting,’ a gutsy, gaunt and surreal story of Scottish heroin junkies, and ‘Sense and Sensibility.”’

Fashion has mostly opted to embrace the junkies. Their style is called heroin chic.

“Trainspotting” chronicles the adventures of a group of addicts who possess a sardonic, anarchic view of life. Their adventures are violent and ugly. But the film makes clear the junkies’ initial pleasure in their addictions. The end may be bleak, but the beginning is sweet.

Says Renton, the strangely alluring narrator, about getting high: “People think it’s all about misery and desperation and death and all that (expletive), which is not to be ignored, but what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it. … Take the best orgasm you ever had, multiply it by a thousand and you’re still nowhere near it.”

It is that first hazy, dangerously seductive sense of contentment that seems to have hooked the fashion industry. “Trainspotting” has both fueled and reflected fashion’s love for junkies. While the aesthetic began long before “Trainspotting” hit the British cinemas early this year, the movie has put heroin chic on the big screen in an explanatory, almost documentary, way.

Inside the fashion industry, rumors and knowing accounts of heroin abuse by models, stylists and editors have become so standard that new tales are met with nonchalance. A recent article in Allure, that told the story of a smack-addicted model, called heroin “the worst-kept secret in modeling.” Tripping does not shock.

More than a year ago, fashion show audiences chuckled when James Iha of Smashing Pumpkins shuffled awkwardly down the runway at an Anna Sui show. He seemed so dazed that model Amber Valletta had to gently guide him backstage. Was it a put-on or for real? Either way, it was accepted as part of the normal theatrics of a fashion show. (A backup musician for the band, Jonathan Melvoin, recently died of a heroin overdose.)

Like the young men in “Trainspotting,” fashion leaders shoot for the exhilaration of the edge, always trying to outmaneuver life’s inevitable mundanity. They dismiss rules. They’re cynical and aim to shock. Collections from designers Helmut Lang and Alexander McQueen have reflected this morning-after-a-rough-night style and the seductive nature of death. Lang is known for his pared-down silhouettes and hollow-cheeked, dour models. McQueen was in the spotlight this spring for his tattered and torn collection of tailored suits and lace blouses that were sometimes accessorized with crown-of-thorns jewelry.

“I’ve worked on three films this summer. All three (filmmakers) have said. ‘I want that Helmut Lang, sexy, young junkie aesthetic.’ It’s huge, absolutely huge,” says Amee Simmons, a New York-based artist and stylist.

Fashion didn’t conjure up the look of zoned-out kids. The days when fashion could single-handedly create an aesthetic are long gone. Designers copied this from the street, from the addicts themselves. They cleaned it up. Validated it. And now they’re selling it.