Fashion is all about pushing boundaries, exploring different ideas through a blend of tradition and innovation, creating trends that ebb and flow throughout the years and displaying creativity and intelligence in mostly beautiful and often unusual ways.

Some trends disappear, only to find a new spark of life with a new generation - look at the return of 80s-style high-waisted mom jeans over the past five or so years. Other trends are fleeting - iconic for a moment, and then relegated back to the archives of fashion history.

But occasionally, along comes an item that is truly unique: something that takes these notions of creativity and originality to new, obscene, baffling heights. We’ve rounded up some of the strangest pieces to emerge from the ‘farshun’ world in recent years, which truly prove the thin line between innovation and insanity.

Not-so-fab footwear
Major fashion designers love to spice up their runway looks with funky shoes that shock and surprise - but these pieces did that for all the wrong reasons.

Take, for instance, the Fanny Pack Slides released by Nike in May. I’m sorry, but what is the fanny pack actually meant to add? It’s certainly not style, and it’s not function, either - unless people are getting into the habit of popping off their slides at the local cafe, and balancing on one foot while they pull out some loose change from their foot fanny pack for their cappuccinos.

Also, somebody really needs to explain to Balenciaga and Christopher Kane that crocs are the Danny DeVito of shoes: something I love to laugh at, but wouldn’t go within ten feet of.
Kane’s attempts to bedazzle the clunky clogs with geodes and gems is as useless as putting lipstick on a pig; while Balenciaga’s platformed monstrosities literally just take the ugliness to new heights. To adapt a quote from Mean Girls: “Stop trying to make crocs happen! It’s not going to happen!”

Cringey Clothing
Ah, Balenciaga. As if the crocs weren’t enough of a faux-pas, back in May they started selling a shirt … with another shirt stuck to it. And the price to pay for this chance to appear like a human clothesline is a mere $1700!

And speaking of unnecessarily pricey statement pieces, if you want to make the statement that you’re an idiot for spending so much on something so stupid, remember PRPS’s dirt jeans? Yup, they actually sold mud-dipped jeans for over $500, so that, according to their website, you could show the world that “you're not afraid to get down and dirty”.

More affordable were Topshop’s plastic jeans, from last year. Aren’t they gorgeous? Just looking at them, you can imagine all the fun you’d have sweating it up, getting chafed in places you thought were unchafable and making awkward squeaking noises anywhere you go. Oh boy, I’m really regretting having missed out on them myself!

As we all know, cut-out jeans are pretty on-trend at the moment - you know, the dad-joke-magnets, prompting such comments as “I hope you got those half price, haven’t you noticed that hole in them?!” But if only he could see Carmar’s Extreme Cut Out Jeans - no, literally, I think he may not be able to see them, since the cut out is so extreme that they’re basically invisible. But I’ll be real here, the wildest part about this design is that they’re a woman’s pair of jeans with actually decent-sized pockets. Hang on a sec - anyone got a spare $230?