Fashion Would You Rather: Hulking Sweater Monster vs. Elegant Loofa

Welcome to Fashion Would You Rather, a feature in which I find very ugly clothes and force you to choose which you would rather don in public.

This week, we are again honoring Fashion Month, voyaging in to the realm of high-concept. Thus, our contenders are a very elegant loofa paired with a chic face-net and an ensemble fit for the beleaguered spawn of Quasimodo and the Phantom of the Opera.

Here’s a closer look at the contenders:

This glorious getup is by Gareth Pugh, who has been called the Mad Prince of British Fashion. He is famous for having once made a poodle suit with condoms for ears; he’s far more concerned with spectacle than commercial viability, as you may be able to discern (he didn’t sell a single garment until his fourth or fifth collection). But now his stuff is a bit more wearable! Beyoncé wears him! If she can do it, so can you (???).

And here we have a conceptual sweater thing by Comme des Garçons. Rei Kawakubo (the house’s founder and designer) is a genius known for her constant experimentation with and reinvention of the medium; she was the designer who made black cool, and she is very in to stylish deconstruction, as well as the beautifully grotesque. Plus, this is literally the perfect garment to don on a Monday morning — in Kawakubo’s own words, the theme of this collection was “The craziness of humanity, the fear we all have, the feeling of going beyond common sense, the absence of ordinariness, expressed by something extremely big, by something that could be ugly or beautiful.” Fun!

WHICH WOULD YOU RATHER (keeping in mind that you couldn’t remove any part of the look because that is cheating)?