Perhaps one of the most brutalist moments in modern culture occurred in Chicago, when Motown legend Diana Ross, singing ‘I’m Coming Out’, ran down the pitch and took a penalty kick, as part of the opening ceremony of the 1994 World Cup. It’s hard to think that anyone might have decided to pair a singer well known for her glamorous other-worldliness with the rough and tumble of international football. The choice of song, a gay anthem, was already an incongruous enough choice for a sport so desperate to signal its heterosexuality. She sprinted across the pitch, surrounded by dancers, and approached the goal, lined up her shot and – with seeming indifference – tapped the ball, and missed the target. Regardless, the special-effect goal burst open anyway, and Ross ran through it. Still singing, and oblivious to the absurdity of it all.

Why is this moment brutalist? Well, in its high-end glamorization of rough physicality it encapsulated something of the strange reality of much brutalist architecture. Brutalism wasn’t just about creating the essentials of modern life – blocks of flats, shops, integrated infrastructure. It was also an opportunity to show that industrial amounts of raw concrete could become the perfect backdrop to bling. Both rough and showy, it could be both football and Diana Ross. As for missing the goal? I’ll leave you to decide whether that was the case for some brutalist experiments.

Brutalism’s collision with luxury does have a tendency to tip over into camp on occasion, which is just fine by me. Monumental macho gestures, all zuzhed up with fabulous soft furnishings and to die for concealed lighting. Certainly there is an absurdity to high-end luxury products that is shared in some of brutalism’s more showy excesses. Take the unwearable extremes of couture fashion, for instance, where artifice and outrageousness are embraced, and any thoughts of practicality banished. At this level, luxury isn’t about considering the functional; instead it’s about playing with expensive materials and forms to create something scarce and extraordinary. The fringes of catwalk culture and the edgelands of modern architecture share a tendency to banish the ordinary in favour of celebrating the artfully beautiful, the awkward, the weird.

In their stylish villas and flats the early modernists had been quick to embrace the counter-intuitive luxury of concrete, modelling it into ocean-liner chic and cocktail shaker curves. But it was only in the post-war era that architects began to see the possibilities for juxtaposing concrete at its most raw with the conventional trappings of wealth, such as restaurants and health clubs, more usually associated with opulent, decorative hotels. Le Corbusier’s housing units were a first attempt at exploring that conundrum: in these, the middle class could live in a vertical landscape that also allowed them to tone their body beautiful, eat and drink well, socialize and show off, all against a backdrop of industrial-strength reinforced grit.

It wasn’t alone. Take Metabolism, a post-war Japanese architectural movement closely allied to the brutalist approach that favoured megastructures and took natural patterns of growth as an inspiration. As might a fashion designer, these architects drew on cellular organization, roots, branches and organic shapes to inform their abstract designs and turned them into extravagant multifunctional megastructures. The Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo (1970–72), designed by Kisho Kurokawa, is a superb example of a building that is as much high-end conceptual art as it is architecture. Exposed concrete and methods of prefabrication were used in creating a network of flats and offices that grow out of two central stems, with the 140 capsules leading off them as leaves and branches. The design makes concrete look lighter than air, with cute circular windows and dinky suspended capsules – like helium balloons trapped in a tree canopy. There was scope within the design to connect capsules to create larger spaces, and to add more if necessary. Metabolism’s ‘unfinished’ nature was another feature of the style: buildings should be allowed to grow as they needed. But sadly in this case, the hard to maintain experimental tower soon lost its extraordinary ‘Diana Ross’ celebrity poise. In 2010 the water was cut off, bringing decades of habitation and modernist glamour to an end.

Metabolism is just one of a number of ‘couture’ architectural schools from around the world to be associated with a brutalist approach. Post-war Spain saw the rise of the Organicism movement that, like Metabolism, sought to introduce organic imagery into the mechanized modernist language. A landmark example, Torres Blancas, designed by Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza, was built between 1964–69 in Madrid. The apartments and duplexes in this building form a series of clustered 23-storey circular stems that come together to form the tower. The appearance sits somewhere between a stack of coins of different denominations and the irregular rings of Yucca tree bark. To keep the organic theme flowing, the apartments have oval windows, and white marble dust mixed into the concrete makes the structure gleam luxuriously as it stands over the city. Like so many impressive towers, this petrified tree of a building is now inhabited, in part, by wealthy urban professionals with a fetish for the odd.

Torres Blancas, Madrid, Spain.

Architect: Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza.

The glamorous extremes of brutalism didn’t just manifest themselves as exclusive apartments. Rough concrete also made a perfect backdrop to the sophisticated loucheness of a ski resort. In 1959, art collector Sylvie Boissonnas and her geophysicist husband Eric decided that they wanted to construct a new winter holiday spot in the French Alps, at Flaine. No safer pair of hands than Marcel Breuer to create it. What they ended up with was a small town of concrete slab blocks, hidden in the mountains. A series of buildings – hotels, gallery, shops, library and a chapel – create an upmarket brutalist village in this inhospitable snowy landscape. Of these blocks, Hotel La Flaine, with its sun deck overhanging a precipice, was the most dramatic. As if one of those mini municipal Unités had gone on a skiing trip. Sculptures by Picasso, Dubuffet and Vasarely are permanent and monumental additions to the site. The precast elements feature, of course, Breuer’s favourite faceted concrete surfaces and inset windows.

The resort was popular when it opened and modernism was still in vogue. It exuded the same kind of edgy, sexy allure and bluntness as a New Wave film starring Alain Delon or Jean Seberg. Indeed, in 1973, it became the first resort in Europe to generate its own snow. Fancy. But by the 1990s maintenance had become an issue (do you see a pattern emerging?), and the whole resort began a long slide into obsolescence and neglect. But brighter days lie ahead, as refurbishment and a renewed interest in Breuer’s work and in brutalism generally have begun to rescue the complex.

So, what’s posher than a ski resort? An upmarket marina, of course. One of the most exclusive addresses in the world is Marina City, Chicago. A relatively early scheme, completed between 1959–64, it is dominated by two astonishing 61-storey towers. Their tubular, globular, textured shape resembles the hand grips on some gigantic piece of exercise equipment. Architect Bertrand Goldberg’s marina complex on the river’s edge has it all: a gym, swimming pool, ice rink and bowling alley, as well as a theatre, shops, restaurants and roof gardens. I imagine there are quite a few couture dresses hidden away in the closets of the apartments as well. And, from the number of views from their gorgeously chic semi-circular balconies available on Instagram, it looks like a lot of Airbnb is going on.