WHEN THE POLICE BUSTED A.R.E. WEAPONS' SECRET GIG at the Pat Hearn Gallery in New York's Chelsea in April, the charge might have been crimes of fashion. The 300-strong crowd that spilled onto the pavement of West 22nd Street was a sea of bad taste: asymmetric dye-jobs, mohawks, mullets, moustaches, stenciled denim, prom gowns, stapled neckties, skirts made from stapled neckties, pants made from skirts, badges and bunched taffeta. This wasn't right. These people—svelte, urban 20- to 35-years olds, good-looking women and gay-looking men—have dress-sense in spades. And what were they doing at a gallery at 1am?

Leather-pant rockers A.R.E. Weapons had barely thrashed out their first track before the sirens wailed. Fortunately, it wasn't the band these oddly-dressed hipsters had come to see, but each other. Indeed, the fact that tonight their ranks included Hedi Slimane, Chlöe Sevigny, and Mary Jo Diehl, made for a unique perspective on the current fashion scene. Hedi Slimane is big-name-couture's hottest designer. He turned YSL around and made Brad Pitt's wedding suit. He now heads up the House of Dior. Elegant in a denim jacket and white shirt, the Parisian looked somewhat bewildered amidst the sheer designerlessness of Pat Hearn.

"I'm not here for the fashion," said M. Slimane, hovering gingerly at the doorway, "...rather for the experience, the attitude." Our eyes drifted to the center of the room, where a leather-capped Chlöe Sevigny stood in a group of Flashdance extras. What did M. Slimane think of Imitation of Christ-the design house for which the actress moonlights as creative director? M. Slimane's English seemed to falter. "I- don't know their stuff," he said diplomatically.

Imitation of Christ have been called "anti-fashion" designers and "deconstructionists." With Chlöe Sevigny as muse, they create their line by taking thrift-store items of eighties clothing and recontextualizing them-as high fashion. Last year it was frumpy blouses reborn with the addition of braided hair sashes; this spring, old prom gowns with lace insets. It's earned them a lot of press and critical acclaim. I asked Ms. Sevigny to comment on the success of Imitation of Christ. "We're in America," the Boy's Don't Cry starlet replied: "Everybody wears horrible clothes!"

Farther into the dark gallery, in a hand-stitched, hand-painted t-shirt, and a cloud of cigarette smoke, stood the still unknown Mary Jo Diehl. Her label, the House of Diehl, wouldn't unleash its work on the world for several months, but to this writer she had long been vocal with her opinions. What did she think of our auspicious guests?

Ms Diehl, swept an arm: "We're all stylists, at least on a personal level. And we've all been going to thrift stores since we were old enough to take a bus. The designer is irrelevant." She checked herself: "No. The designer is dead."

It's not just designers that see patterns. This scene conveniently put into miniature theater the points of my essay: fashion has earned the right to be in a gallery; and it has done so by moving away from mainstream couture, such as Yves Saint Laurent, through Imitation of Christ, to the doorstep of Mary Jo Diehl.

BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE IN UGLY CLOTHES

Fashion is not art. Attempts to raise the status of fashion design – the Armani exhibit in the Guggenheim last year, or Westwood at the Radical Fashion show now running in the London V&A – face a popular rebuttal: Art is a comment on the human condition. Fashion is a comment on hemlines. That anyone from Monica Lewinsky to rapper P. Diddy can properly claim to be a "designer" doesn't help. Meanwhile, the few artists working in garments – Elena Bajo for example – seem rarely to create something that Joe Gap would consider wearable, let alone fashionable. And certainly, such "creations" are not sold at Barneys.

Where fashion is being looked at anew is among that jeunesse doree so appealing to Hedi Slimane. These creative, fashion-conscious, culturally-aware men and women live in every style capital. Just open the pages of the thriving "culture-couture" magazines: Nylon, iD, Surface, Paper, Cheap Date.

There they are – being covered or doing the covering; shooting the fashion story or styling the model for the shoot; doing the modeling or DJing for the models at the after-party; or just getting photographed at those parties. It's a scene. They recognize one another. Chlöe Sevigny is their poster-child. Call them The Beautiful People in Ugly Clothes. They are beginning, as a group, to dismantle the notion that fashion must be pretty. Not as an anti-fashion movement, such as Punk or grunge – rather, how modernism dismantled the notion that art must be beautiful a hundred years ago.

Why now? Opportunity and audience afforded by their magazines. Interest from sponsors such as Levis, Coca Cola and Ford. And necessity – this is an age when High Street retailers such as H&M bring out copies of top designer lines within a season. Anyone with money can have the Gucci dress; everyone else can buy the rip-off. The style elite must show their sophistication in a different way: by finding a vintage/non-designer item off the beaten track – and proclaiming it "cool." Otherness is the only requirement for such an item. And otherness, particularly in New York, means ugly.

"We want to stand out," explains Time Out NY fashion stylist Susan Joy, in a slashed and embroidered t-shirt advertising Paris. "A lot of it is about irony. We grew up thinking that cheap-and-nasty Eighties fashion was the most disgusting thing. It's a challenge to take something that's ugly and uncool, and make it work. But you have to be sure that you are so cool and beautiful that you can get away with it."

They are getting away with it. The styles from their couture magazines are filtering to the mainstream magazines, and from there to the high street. But the real coup remains largely unacknowledged: By reclaiming cool as a product of themselves, and not of the movies or advertising, these hipsters are – individually – giving their clothes status, not the other way round. In doing so, they are transcending the fame gap. Till now, only the James Deans and the Madonnas were bigger than the clothes they wore, which is why designers scramble to dress the hottest actors and pop stars. Now each of these hipsters has that power. And with it, they're demonstrating (unwittingly, so far, and on a small scale) that an item of clothing on a hanger has no intrinsic "style" value – neither through cut, nor cloth, nor designer label. Ms. Diehl, you'll recall, claimed that the designer was irrelevant. At the Pat Hearn, M. Slimane got a taste of that irrelevancy.

FASHION VICTIMS

Out of this milieu – breathing fresh air into fashion – comes style house Imitation of Christ. Duo Matt Damhave, 23, and Tara Subkoff, 29 scour Salvation Army stores to find "tasteless," designer-less items of clothing, which they rework slightly and relabel. The two seem to understand the implications. An old Yves Saint Laurent men's shirt from their first collection screamed the words: "Bring Me the Head of [Gucci Designer] Tom Ford." They are making it work. After three seasons, they are CFDA nominees; their work is in the pages of Vogue; and prices at Barney's begin at $2000.

Mainstream fashion magazines don't know what to make of IoC. Possibly borrowing from the same source, they give long column inches to the "chopped, tattered, torn-apart, reconstructed" nature of the clothing – as though that might provide the artistry that could merit their inflated prices (surely a fool's mission). But IoC stopped "deconstructing" the clothes after their first collection. More recent items boast only the sort of alterations a stylist could make before a photo shoot: a silkscreen on the shoulder of a black button-up shirt, a braid attached to a silk meringue of a prom dress. (Prom dress, shirt, and braid, all bought, and all left pretty much intact.)

It's definitely punk, but if their work does make overtures to collage, it is the sort of collage we engage in every day getting dressed. And if the pieces show grace, balance, surprise, tension, or visual wit, it's mainly down to the models they put them in. It seems to suggest that IoC are subverting the physical aspects of their clothing to serve a larger point. But it's a charge they both deny. So are they really trying to bury the designer?

I spoke to Damhave the day before his September show. He called himself "not a fashion designer, but an artist." Carrot-haired, bespectacled, charming, in an old t-shirt and ripped jeans, he certainly looked more art school than fashion house. What was their art?

The Imitation of Christ manifesto, written in April 2000, is obscure:

"...[I]s it time to return to the point of departure and hearken the eminent backlash, to heed the echoes of dissent that have remained inaudible, buried beneath the white noise of mass production and uniformity, to pull the sutures tight in the flesh of the decaying past not so that it might live and linger but ultimately evolve as a basis for the new aesthetic, the new sincerity[?]"

No help there. Damhave also described his garments to me "not as products, but as relics from an idea." Was the fashion show spectacle the idea? IoC's debut show was held on a subway station escalator in downtown Los Angeles; last year's show was staged in a funeral parlor in the East Village (the death of fashion? the resurrection of clothes?); in September, they turned the tables on the fashion press. All interesting and hype-friendly, but not primary to the work.

"We're fighting against a Fascist fashionista regime, against the Gucci-Prada army," proclaimed Damhave last year in W magazine. If the clothes are relics of anything, I suggest it is that: their two-year-long act of debunking the fashion industry.

Imitation of Christ is a Trojan horse, wheeled inside fashion's fortress by high-spending trend-chasers desperate to be seen in the newest look. Judging from the coverage in Vogue, W, Harper's Bazaar and other fashion journals, the typical Upper East Side clothes horse is not buying IoC-wear as the relic of a conceptual art event. Rather, because hanging on the rack between Issey Miyake and Christian Dior, it must be "to die for." Damhave and Subkoff know this, and seem to be sniggering up their rouched sleeves.

Their work is many fine things. It's prank art. It's Duchamp: if you can put a toilet into an art gallery, you can put old clothes into a fashion show. But what the duo is not selling is "style value." Their goal is seemingly not to give cool-points to the wearer. If that's the case, then they are merely flaunting the trappings of hipster recontextualization without the belief. By positing themselves as another "label," they are simply replacing one despotic regime with another. The wearer is left, in the end, with no style value of his own, and a rather ugly outfit. It's the Emperor's New Clothes writ large. And it brings a whole new shade to the term "fashion victim."

INSTANT COUTURE

Enter Mary Jo Diehl, creator of Instant Couture, a new fashion philosophy coming (at least chronologically) on the heels of Imitation of Christ. But Ms. Diehl doesn't value the IoC approach: "Merely recontextualizing an item is not enough. Duchamp did it 70 years ago," she asserts. "And then to sell it on is cynical. The act of buying Imitation of Christ is the ultimate indicator that you are not in on the joke."

I'm talking to Miss Diehl in her East Village apartment. An idealist's singular vision glazes her eye and she forgets for a moment the cigarette that she's waving about as she gesticulates.

"In buying a thrift store item, selection is the primary creative act," she continues. "It's based on you. Self-expression. And then how you recontextualize it is the second creative act. In mimicking the thrift-store style-maker, Imitation of Christ are neither expressing themselves, nor anyone else. They are just moving an item from one externally generated context to another. In the end, the clothing is ugly, and I'm not Chlöe Sevigny so why am I wearing it?"

The first public work from Ms. Diehl's company, House of Diehl, is the Fashion Automatic Event. The event in this case is the art, and the event is a party. In the course of which, guests don her signature "Instant Couture." The first Fashion Automatic, scheduled for fashion week, was postponed after September 11, but took place in October at New York's interactive technology lounge, Remote. BBC television crews were in attendance. The next event will be held in London during Spring fashion week.

Upon arrival, each guest was drawn into a styling booth, where he or she became the canvas for a one-of-a-kind item of couture-in conference with a House of Diehl stylist, using scissors, pins, and odds and ends. Sometimes the newly created garment was a reconstructed version of the clothes the bemused guest had on; other times, it was a found object the guest had brought along, or other pieces of material, but it always unique to the wearer. On completion, each fashion "creation" had a House of Diehl label stapled to it, and the guest was pushed down a runway in front of snapping fashion photographers.

As a party, it swung. And as the stream of styled guests (in a crowd that included DJ Moby and artist Damian Loeb) presented themselves to photographers, it became clear that the primary point of the event was working: people looked fashionable. This was no art school project gone wrong. It was New York nightlife at its hippest.

A woman had netting wrapped across her face in a bold clash of saucy fishnet and sultry veil. A man sported a sweatband cut from an old sleeve that looked almost identical to a Marc Jacobs accessory showing on the catwalks of Europe that same week.

A denim toga spoke both to the Oscar success of Gladiator, and to the recent craze for customizing jeans. An eighties Jordache dress was renewed with lace; elsewhere, an elaborate ruffled sleeve turned a conservative t-sweater into an asymmetric signature piece à la radical design team As Four. Armpieces and leggings were big.

Slogans were peppered liberally. Accessories were all the rage. All looks (by definition) worked for the wearer, and all came off as now. That surely is exactly what it means to be "stylish." But House of Diehl had also pushed fashion to its absurd conclusion: instant, lifestyle-based, reference-heavy, and wearable for precisely one evening.

So it's fashion. But can Ms Diehl's work also be called culturally provocative, instructive, disruptive, influential, problematic, or any other adjective that might give it artistic validity? I want to prove that it can. It should be noted here that Ms. Diehl is a philosopher as well as an artist, and she has thought her vision through. My interpretations of her work come fairly directly from discussions with her as well as from her manifesto-heavy supporting material.

DEATH OF THE DESIGNER

Instant Couture is not just a fashion line, but a fashion philosophy, a fashion approach. The principle tenet of this philosophy is stamped on the invite of the first show.

"The Death of the Designer" is not a reference to our hipsters, but to Roland Barthes seminal essay, The Death Of The Author (Trans. Stephen Heath: Hill, 1977). In it, Barthes undermines the "authority" of the author, and asserts the mastery of a text. To show where Ms. Diehl was going, I've taken two lines from Barthes' essay and transposed author for fashion designer, and writings for styles:

Fashion "is a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of [styles], none of them original, blend and clash... The [fashion designer] can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix [styles] ... in such a way as never to rest on any one of them."

Two points: the Barthesian Diehl, culture defines the socially constituted "designer," not the other way round. As the author does not exist prior to or outside of language, neither does the fashion designer exist above or beyond popular culture. Fashion is merely a collage of signs referring to various cultural signposts, which in turn have other cultural referents: i.e., it's all smoke and mirrors.

Then, with the Author dismissed, the reader is hailed as essential to the text. Similarly, Miss Diehl asks the wearer to write his/her "style value" anew. Wearer is "muse" in the Instant Couture process-nominally, by bringing along a found object for the styling; in a truer sense, by bringing along his or her own set of fashion referents and beliefs.

So, the wearer gives the item a definition. Which takes us back to our earlier hipsters. But now the process has been taken out of that small milieu and democratized. Here, everyone is their own fashion icon. ("Celebrate the debut of you," said the Fashion Automatic invite). The fame gap is universally transcended. Of course, the process requires self-confidence. To that end, stylists actively raise the perceived value of the wearer-via hype, compliments, doting stylists, and photographers. Says Ms Diehl: "I'm not asking you to look like your idols, I'm asking you to be you. The best you that you could ever be."

Where Imitation of Christ succeeded by making fashion victims, House of Diehl succeeds by making fashion victors.

CULTURE OF INVOLVEMENT

Barthes' assumption that the writer writes what the reader completes opened possibilities of collective authorship. Proving that artistic creation need not originate from a single, fixed source was within Barthes reach, but his assault remained purely academic. Attempts to reify it (those Choose Your Own Adventure children's books for example) usually fail. Instant Couture, however, insofar as it is fashionable, succeeds. This is the second tenet of Ms. Diehl's philosophy: true interactive creation.

If interactivity seemed best suited to video games and online learning tools, a recent essay co-authored by Ms Diehl with The Velvet List gives it a wider perspective:

"Today's culture is the culture of involvement. We're all famous, soon will be, might as well be. The democratization of fame epitomized in reality TV shows, the media's DIY spin on fame, the theatrical disintegration between the performer and the audience, has thrown everyone in to a wan spotlight. And held in that spotlight, we've all felt the urge to dance, to be part of the event. Do we feel we can? Of course! Andy Warhol... pulled aside the curtain and debunked the "mystique" of creativity long ago. And, being the tech-whores that we are, we all know how to use the controls.... [T]he culture of involvement requires art to be active. Or better still, interactive."

Today's give-it-a-go Karaoke culture, she implies, urges us towards Barthes' theories of authorship. Art can belong to all of us, together. Or, at least, it would if we all agreed that what is created is always meaningful. Unfortunately, not every barroom rendition of My Way is worth recording. Not every team effort is more than the sum of its parts. However, the act of engaging is meaningful in art. Fluxus, Dada, and other 20th century movements have long pushed the importance of the viewer's role, and even recruited the viewer into the action (open a matchbox, think of a number). Fluxus may have created the moment-but it still did not create in the moment. The "art work" remained the property of the artist, who delivered his concepts for the viewer to chew on in the cab home. Instant Couture has strived to bridge the gap between real viewer involvement and artistic worth.

"Art should no longer be the subject, but the platform for conversation," says Ms Diehl. When that conversation succeeds, it dissolves the Designer-Wearer dichotomy into the chaos, accidents and intuitions of the mind's creative process. And Diehl's work exacerbates (or perhaps homogenizes) that, by doubling it, in two minds. Either way, there is intercourse. And that intercourse, judging from the passion of Mary Jo Diehl and her co-stylists at work, borders on the sexual. Not just because of the proximity of bodies – the finished creation is a mutual gratification for stylist and wearer.

YOU, ME, US

Truly interactive art represents, figuratively, sex over masturbation, in a time when – in life and art – onanism has never been so prevalent. Self-help, self-promotion, self-depreciation, self-belief, self-loathing all reflect our increased interest in who we (individually) are. Yet, the myth of Narcissus is a cautionary tale not a love story. Self-oriented we may be but, especially now, is "we" not preferable to "I"?

September 11 (it's not possible to talk about culture today without mentioning it) is not necessarily the reason, but is certainly a hook, for the sense that "I" might finally be giving way to "we" in the cultural consciousness. You could see it before September 11 in the season's fashion spreads, with their distinctly communal-hippy ethos, but it was the saga of group sacrifice at Ground Zero that has most driven home the urgent need for community. The question, deep as we are in Me Country, is how to achieve it.

Ms Diehl tackles that problem by finding community in self-interest. Instant Couture leverages both the camaraderie generated among co-creators, and their vanity. It takes the self-obsession that fuels fashion, and recasts it as self-realization. The Fashion Automatic event is a great party. Why? Because there's a spotlight, and it moves from guest to guest. Everyone is the star. It's no coincidence that fifteen minutes is approximately how long it takes to be styled, photographed, and walk the catwalk.

Arthur C. Danto, in his book Beyond the Brillo Box (UCal Press, 1992), states:

"Warhol's thought that anything could be art was a model, in a way, for the hope that human beings could be anything they chose, once the divisions that had defined culture were overthrown. Joseph Beuys' claim that everyone was an artist was a collorary to Warhol's sweeping egalitarianism."

Mary Jo Diehl's assertion that everyone can be a fashion designer is a collorary to Beuys. And since we're going that route, then let's allow that anybody can also be a DJ, a film-star, a model, and whatever other roles exist solely as cultural fabrications.

Modern life, since Warhol, has raised us all to greatness, by acknowledging the plurality of everything. Technology and the Internet have helped, too. Where we used to be a society based on knowledge exchange (I trust you to make my shirt, you trust me to write an article), in cultural matters we are now all experts. The designer is dead because we are all designers. But before you burn your best Italian suit, know that the Designer (big D) is not really dead, he's just playing possum. In fact, the idea that the self-made stylist will forever after be the hero of the fashion world neglects the very real pleasure that comes from surrendering to the seductions of a great artist. Yes, Instant Couture is a cultural necessity for today's ego, and will remain so; but it will never replace that very particular feeling of entering the hotel lobby in an exquisitely-made, single-breasted cashmere blazer, a perfect 42 long. And for that, I say, Long live the Designer! •••