This place have been sanctified by the visitation of Manolo himself! He even wrote comments. I cannot tell you what happens in my lady parts without telling wordpress to protect innocent eyes from my blog. But lots of moisture is involved.
So the point (directly taken from one of his recent posts) was to discuss “the perennial fashion trend of extremely costly clothing made to look like garbage.” Like this:
Good bad taste
I seem to be going to do my snobbish bitch and throw a little discordance in this harmonious gospel of commonsensical obviousness. You know me, right? I’m quite the bitch. I would buy blood and semen fragrance.
So why is that I get tickling in my lady parts when I read consensual abhorrement of the trashy expensive fashion?
Firstly, as I happen to know first hand (you guessed right), hot girls are even hotter in well chosen trash, which does provide the spice of a contrast. It’s just a question of measure (it always is). So it all makes sense when you go for hot.
Smoking hot trash
I don’t. But I see fashion (at least the interesting part of it) more as one of the fine arts than anything else. And not engineering. Nothing in the world will justify the price tags of fashionable shoes when seen from the point of view of functional efficiency (as the Manolo himself discovered to his great stupefaction on the occasion of a pair of Timberlands if I my memory doesn’t betray me).
Fine arts are more than anything about the expression of freedom, which received during the last century a peculiar interpretation: systematic transgression (not that the element was lacking before, it was just not systematic). There is great joy (of undeniable artistic nature) in the sadist and deliberate aggression of well established values. Ever since the divin Marquis himself. One of those being the monotonic function from production costs and use value to price tags. So it will be outrageously expensive. And it’s not a downside, it’s meant that way, it really matters (read L’Erotisme of Georges Bataille for an elaboration of the tension between art and technology).
Another establishment to merrily demolish is good taste. Since Baudelaire at least, good taste is the worst enemy of art. But taste is racing close behind art. There has been times when a play by Oscar Wilde or some apples painted by Cézanne sufficed to raise storms in the circles blessed with good taste and manners. But modern taste has a much stronger stomach, the boundaries have been pushed far away, there is much space in the playground.
Only, you know the artists, how they are. They won’t leave those boundaries alone. They just have a problem with the notion. They want to have bad taste, to kick the bourgeois where it hurts. These guys are impossible people.
And the worst part is that they will find obnoxiously wealthy and hot bitches not unlike yours truly (except maybe for the wealthy part) willing to give them shocking amounts of easily earned money for a bag looking just like the trash bag, just a french-rose-scented trash bag with carbon nanotube in it, nothing too fancy.
Until, of course, there’s nobody left to be shocked by that. You know, like you would make a statement saying you love Van Gogh or Beethoven. Wow. Punk.
Trash Art, circa 1886.
Which_is_Good 
You must admit that the reactionary Manolo and his beloved readers occupy the valuable niche in the ecosystem you have describe, we are the bourgeoisie who must be épater-ed. Without our cries of outrage, the system by which modern artists validate themselves would collapse. Indeed, we are witnessing that collapse.
We are watching the parasites overwhelming the host (cf: English, Department of). And without the host to support them, the parasites also must die. Without the dominant culture to decry, the decriers will decry alone. (And then it will be Who’s Decrying Now?)
If you cannot shock the unshockable, what do you do? You must start again at the beginning, at first principles. Hence the Manolo the Reactionary.
Funny how Pier Paolo Piccioli, lead designer at Valentino, goes right your way:
“If fashion is about today, then today it’s time to go back to elegance. Elegance is subversive. The real subversion is culture.”
On that last one, count me in. Without culture, subversion is mere gesticulation.
“The real subversion is culture”. Very true.
But I have to say, the “hot people in trash only look hotter” idea does not apply in the photo illustrating the concept. It doesn’t apply in the Vivienne Westwood menswear collection alluded to in the Manolo’s post, either. Hot people in trash look…grimy and unpredictable, like a toddler making mudpies all afternoon, in need of a diaper change. If the trash is pricey, then they look deluded and grimy and unpredictable.
“deluded and grimy and unpredictable” …
Hmm.
I may go for such a look. The unpredictable part is exactly what it was all about. Deluded may be good, in so far as it’s edgy. Grimy, well… as long as it’s sandalwood-scented grime…
As for the hotness of the pictures, I’ll just remark the following. Elegance, as beauty, are very conceivably matters of universal judgement (Kant (and many other major league philosophers) had no doubt on this, I guess it’s a passable argument for things being conceivably this way). Hotness, on the other hand, is a matter of biological processes involving your precious bodily fluids, and the mental representations thereof. One cannot dream to regulate ‘hotness’ for all mankind.
Actually, many did try and still are on it, but have always pathetically failed. What lights your fire is definitely in the singular range, and people with stereotyped fantasies just don’t know what their fantasies are.