Modern Woman

A Trend Report Beyond the Runway

There’s a lot to parse from the negative reactions to Maria Grazia Chiuri’s dialogue with overt feminism in her collections for Christian Dior. That dialogue that continued this Spring with the use of Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?", the title of which was printed on the sweater of the collection’s opening look. It’s heavy-handed. Sure, it is. It’s for corporate profit. Again, sure (what isn’t these days). But those quick, terse reactions leave more pressing questions unanswered. Namely, why this is the first time, in a modern fashion context, that we’re engaging with feminism in a loud, raucous, inescapable manner? Why is this one of the first times we’re seeing a runway conversation that encourages dialogue about what it means to be a modern woman?

This spring, that conversation is center stage. Collections that debuted in the fall of 2017 are hitting stores in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s takedown, a period where “Time’s Up” for the physical, sexual and emotional trauma inflicted by patriarchy. Fashion loves conversation in the form of a clever soundbite or headline, but many designers fervently attempt to remove their creation from the context of history.

But time’s up for that too.

With the 2nd Women’s March at our backs and the work of electing female leaders to office in our foreground, it’s impossible to see Spring’s err toward utility and volume as anything less than a call to arms and a celebration of women’s work. The work they’ve done in raising us, guiding us, providing us with inspiration, all without recognition and often in the face of previously unspeakable turmoil.

For many of us, femininity has defined a certain type of strength to be admired, to be replicated. It’s a type of strength found on women through design or, perhaps by circumstance, predilection, indignation (likely a potent cocktail of all three). On women who by joyous choice, or less glamorous, clean cut circumstance welcome us into the world as humans.

That’s why there’s so much curiosity, so much to digest, in Raf Simon’s use of voluminous couture shapes, crafted from nylon and rubber, to channel this season’s trends. There’s something about his vision of an American nightmare that’s frighteningly au courant: women in (is it blood) stained rubber skirts and capes. Glamourous shapes that can be washed of the sins of others with mild soap and warm water. And then, off to the next mess that requires tidying. That is the American nightmare we’re living in and trying so desperately to wake from.

Clothes rarely escape meaning. Folks who oft repeat the tired phrase, “oh, I don’t care about clothes,” in most cases, look like it. Either their choices relate a utilitarian need to project an unfussy authority with a shirt and tie, or they pick items who’s ever-present comfort connotes a complete anathema to the idea of fashion. No matter how hard one may try, clothes will be signifiers: of our psyche, our choices, our predilections.

No one knew that more than Princess Di, Virgil Abloh’s muse for this Spring’s Off-White collection of mid-century couture-inspired shapes. Princess Diana used her clothes as a way to express herself in broad, painterly strokes as a woman seeking to be freed from stifling expectations of motherhood and respectability. She represents what clothes can do and say, the power they hold in shaping an attitude. That power is more necessary than ever.

It’s a sea change when the typically cryptic and elusive Miuccia Prada says, plainly, that her work this Spring is purely about empowering women to move: full of flat, chunky shoes, and peppered with hints of athleisure, made for hitting the streets. Outsized tailoring and prints inspired by women cartoonists from the 30s and 60s made for a vision of a woman that was more than a male ideal. This was a woman ready to take up space. To raise the volume. On her own terms.

This sense of taking up space - space that is owned, that is deserved, space that is resolutely owed - couldn't have executed more deftly than it was at Phoebe Philo’s Celine collection. Full of oversized shapes, loose threads, and billowing wings, it encapsulated so many of this season’s trends in a way that felt the most adult, most womanly, the most feminine and feminist. As clothes edged by on runway, grazing past editors and buyers who shuffled to move their feet and bags from the narrow path carved for the presentation, it was easy to imagine the clothes working the same way for women that will eventually wear them. Walking through, free. Unencumbered.

It’ll be sad to see Philo leave the stage, however short the hiatus may be, regardless of what she does next. There’s nothing more thrilling than seeing sisterhood in motion, and she did that with her collections, making clothes that refused to wilt, that refused to infantilize. Those clothes that speak volumes about the confident, idiosyncratic women that wear them. Feminist, womanist clothes that don’t need words or explanation.

In this climate, we need more of them.