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I'm in college and I just feel more comfortable and confident when I wear expensive shirts. Is that bad?
I mean, a lot of people just wear sweats to class, but I like how I look in Polo.
The habit/trend has given me several nicknames over my years at college
[ polo prince, prince of polo, pony boy ]
Does this send the wrong message?
Speaking as someone who has worn every brand you're hyping here, you sound like a huge douche label whore. Like, seriously, just dropping designer names is meaningless.
Rick Owens makes nice clothes sometimes, but you can look like a total idiot wearing DDunks pretty easily, so who cares if you own Rick sneakers.
Balenciaga makes more shit than they do purchase-worthy clothes. What is the most noteworthy thing that label has ever done? Glow in the dark sneakers?
KVA is a clusterfuck most of the time, enough said. I would estimate less than 5% of the population of people who actually care about clothes could get away with a KVA wardrobe. 95% would just look like idiots.
Dior Homme is often basically KVA's idea of what Hedi Slimane would think was cool. The quality's middling.
Margiela is design team - i.e. it's a team of people employed by the parent company trying to imitate the look and feel of a Margiela collection. "Okay guys, what colour 5 zip should we release this season? OOOOH how about a silk one!"
Basically all you've said here is you spend a lot of money on clothes (unless you're just buying shit secondhand on ebay, superfuture and stylezeitgeist). Cool, but that means absolutely nothing with respect to whether you know what you're talking about or what you're doing. Any trust fund kid can spend an evening on the internet and end up decking himself out in Julius and Attachment, but they're probably just wasting a lot of money.
To take it a step further, the fact that you made this post and dropped these names without any context, as if saying "I wear Rick" means something in and of itself, suggests that you've newly discovered the world of FASHUNZ and want to use it to sound somehow culturally superior, and you don't actually know your shit.
So enough of that.
To everyone else: He was right about one thing: Polo RL shirts are not "nice". They're just polo shirts with a pony embroidered into them by a machine in China. There is nothing particularly WRONG with this, it's how everyone in this industry does business. It's how they survive and thrive.
Polo DOES make some nice things - their suits are made in Italy by Corneliani, their shoes are mostly Crockett & Jones (I'm wearing a shell pair while typing this), the label has some outstanding knitwear (which usually doesn't have a polo pony on it, FYI).
The polo shirts, meanwhile, is basically their money-maker. They make those shirts for pennies and sell them at huge margins to people who want to pay for a logo on their chest, and this makes up for the relatively SMALL margins they make on other stuff. For example, their profit on a handknit sweater that retails for, say, $500.00, or a suit for $2000.00, might be 30% or something, whereas the markup on those Polos is like... 1000%. But, they HAVE to keep making the lower margin items to maintain the brand's image and cachet as "luxurious", or whatever they're trying to convey.
All clothing companies have to do this. They need the suckers to buy the cash-producing items to be able to fund the rest of what they make. Scarves, perfume, cuff links, t shirts, etc, there's lots of "high margin" items that are used to do this so that when you balance it all out the company's profitable. A lot of the "high fashion" brands, whatever that means, actually lose money on half of their collection and have to make up the difference by selling cologne or something.
