Men are from normcore, women are from trad lives
“We padded the hip a little to make the waist look even tinier”
This Monday morning I was on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4, alongside Enrika, a commercial curve model. We were invited on the show to talk about my favourite fashion failing of the industry’s compulsion to a very thin (usually white) ideal and the declining impact of body positivity. Doing WH is always fun, because it feels very proper and grown up and you always meet interesting, impressive women in the green room.
The mild panic of doing live radio is that obviously as soon as you’re off air you think of all the more pertinent things you could have said in a much pithier, articulate way. The final question was frustrating, positing the rather tedious accusation that to cast non sample size women in a fashion show might ‘promote obesity’.
What I wish I had said was that I resent the premise of the question, that showing women’s bodies in all their permutations is true beauty, and to hurl scare-mongering accusations at women for merely existing in their own frame isn’t really getting us very far as a sex. Also in terms of runway models - to have a few more size 10s would be progress! Representation matters because the alternative of only seeing one particular very rigid idea of ‘beauty’ starts to feel a little eugenics-coded.
You can listen to the full episode here!
The conversation has also prompted me to take a little temperature check, so to speak, on where we are in the fashion calendar. We’ve seen menswear shows for autumn/winter, and summer haute couture and are well into the New York women’s wear autumn winter calendar. To come still, London, Milan and Paris. Gird your Instagram feeds.
You know I think one thing we can all be thankful for is that no one’s going to be banging that burgundy (sorry, ‘ancora’ red) drum for a while now that poor sweet Sabato de Sarno has been rather unceremoniously ejected from his role as Gucci’s creative director.
To recap menswear it was somewhere between Pedro Pascal in The Last of Us and every boy in Dalston/Brooklyn circa 2007. Prada with its caveman fur touches was very apocalypse chic. Very Grrrr MEN, rugged, trad-rad-cowboy-dad. Alongside this there was a bit of a normcore pivot with some Grrrr MEN rugged lumberjack hipsters thrown in for good measure too.
The embracing of the full when-men-were-men here, comes as an inflection point where (10 points if you can guess where I’m going with this) women’s wear has taken its own retrograde turn.
With the general ousting of any varied body representation on the runway, designers are playing around with proportion and shape, but with cloth obviously, not flesh.
Corsetry has made a jarring return. At Schiaparelli, Daniel Roseberry presented a collection of looks which allowed little in the way of breathing for the wearer. In a video for Vogue France of the designer sketching fantastical illusions of women, he commented that the hips had been curved and padded, in order to “make the waist look even tinier.”
This idea continued apace, at Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri offered bird cage crinolines (worn by Ariana Grande at the Critics Choice awards). At Valentino, Alessandro Michele put his models into mad Harlequin gowns with elaborately wide skirts that resembled kitsch loo roll dolls.
Marc Jacobs opened New York Fashion Week with a show which seemed to pick up on Rei Kawakubo’s 1997 ‘lumps and bumps’ Comme de Garçon collection; the clothing was sculpted into bulbous shapes, strange arched backs and comedy-butt skirts.
These looks were all modelled on the usual tiny ‘sample’ size models, showing that fabric can be heavy, lumpen and curved, but the body below cannot. That your dress may take up space, but that your frame will be constricted underneath. This is something that is happening on the red carpet, too. Naked dressing is over (someone tell Bianca whatsherface) demure, retro and body restrictive frocks are in.
I give you Demi “put the measuring stick down” Moore in, of course, Schiaparelli:
It is hard to look at these clothes, which fetishise the extreme hourglass figure most women naturally don’t have, and not see the current of politics’ return to conservatism. It is interesting that at a time, across the world, where women’s rights are being eroded and gender binaries rigidly enforced, that fashion’s response for us is a corset, Quasimodo sweaters and clown shoes.
SOMETHING TO KEEP AN EAR OUT FOR
Is the power ballad making its way back? Schiaparelli closed its show to the ribald tones of Carly Simon’s Let the River Run (also a key part of the Working Girl soundtrack, lol, irony). While in The Last Showgirl (Pamela Anderson’s acting comeback vehicle) Jamie Lee Curtis gyrates sadly to Total Eclipse of Heart by Bonnie Tyler. Ears peeled for a third trend-maker please.
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xVx