Nowadays, I’m endlessly fascinated by what people wear and why they chose to wear it. Fashion, to me, is a rich category under the umbrella of self-image and presentation. Since coming to a major urban area for university, I’ve witnessed a wide-ranging variety of fashion styles, more than ever before. Within this variety, luxury brands, particularly footwear, have become a major point of curiosity. A recent trend within these brands involves creating a “distressed” or scuffed look on trainer-like shoes, making them appear as though they’ve been found at a secondhand store, while still being sold for multiple hundreds of dollars. For me, this “artificial wear” raises a few questions, among them: How is the distressed effect created? Why do the shoes still come with cleaning instructions? Why would one pay such high amounts of money to look like they’ve thrifted a pair of old shoes? Signs point to extreme aesthetic fixation and/or brand loyalty, but there seems to be so much more under the surface. luxurious is an attempt to make sense of what goes into this intersection of consumerism, aesthetics, and self-image. In a simple but loaded gesture, old and worn-out shoes are photographed in a product setting similar to their luxury brand counterparts, with accompanying faux descriptions, as a part of a fictional brand. Why those and not these?