At the finale of the Thom Browne show, the last show of New York Fashion Week, a model appeared in a jacket encrusted with gold bullion, worn atop 130 feet of swathed tweed and many layers of crinolines. The skirt was so elaborate, with so many tiers and drapes, it hindered her movement, as if she were weighed down by all the girlish expectations.
To a certain extent, designers are always wrestling with the tropes of femininity — playing with them, embracing them, subverting them, dosing them with irony — but such choices seem much more freighted in the dawn light of trad wives, Barstool Sports and Hulk Hogan. What it means to dress like a woman in the era of the “manosphere” was the central question of this past New York Fashion Week.
When macho posturing is on the rise, do you lean into ruffles and lace and corsets and hobble skirts? Do you play the fainting flower or the sex kitten? The princess in the tower or the pinup? Or do you do something entirely different?
Do you think, for example, of “the matriarch,” like Rachel Scott, the founder and designer of Diotima? Ms. Scott’s collection was for the multitasker of all multitaskers, running the household and the family and the budget. Over the last few months, Ms. Scott said she felt Black women, but also all women, had been “reduced, really flattened” and denied “nuance, complexity and sensuality.”
So she decided to offer it to them in her signature mix of tailoring and crochet work. Giant fringy knit lapels burst forth from suit jackets, which covered openwork tunics or tanks of crystal mesh, and suit trousers were swapped for silk bloomers.
Bloomers? “The first feminist undergarments,” Ms. Scott called them, and though they can read as retrograde, here they looked surprisingly good, kind of like the precursor to sweatpants. Her ability to find the harmony, not merely the tension, in the juxtaposition of kitchen-table craft and C-suite uniform is, in part, what made her the Council of Fashion Designers of America designer of the year in 2024.
But that was just one option for expressing identity. There were others. What was notably missing, however, were women presented as obviously sexualized objects; snacks to enjoy.
Femininity as a Fungible Concept
There were women as furious survivors (or maybe just Furies) at Elena Velez, where a story of shipwrecks and sea creatures was woven into cracked cotton shirting and cool pirate trousers, latex-dipped nighties that clung to the body and dresses dripping tentacles of poisonous green.
Anna Delvey, the society scammer whose story was made into a streaming series, opened the show in an oily skirt and ankle bracelet, but such stunts (like an earlier Velez mud-wrestling show or a runway dressed up as a treatise on “Gone With the Wind”) are sophomoric distractions, obscuring Ms. Velez’s very real talent. Her clothes are a scream into the void all on their own.
That’s one way to be heard. Another was at Luar, where Raul Lopez called his show “El Pato,” which is Spanish for duck and, he said in a preview, a homosexual slur hurled at him as a teenager because of the way he walked. He wanted to reclaim the label and turn it into a thing of glory for … well, whomever. He did that via puffers filled with feathers or bristling with them; jackets cut to rise up on either side of the throat like wings or to drop off one shoulder; and grandiose, 1980s silhouettes: big shoulders, barrel pants.
The point: Your finery is your business. (It was a better point, anyway, than the bodysuits made with hoods that lifted the arms into a limp-wrist position, which were a little on the nose.)
That may seem like a cop-out, the fashion equivalent of the trite adage that women can be anything they want to be, but it’s also a point worth remembering. Femininity is a fungible concept. That’s not a problem; it’s an opportunity.
Sportswear as a Provocation
Still, perhaps the most ubiquitous idea of all was women as executives. Women in control. Well, of course: This is New York. As Michael Kors said before his show of slouchy, swishy trouser suits and oversize shirting, when it comes to sportswear: “Let’s be honest. We invented this.”
True, it’s not exactly a surprise from Mr. Kors. But in the context of the moment, his refusal to equate sexy with see-through read less as boring and more as provocative.
“Hands in the pockets, covered up,” he said. “In a weird way, that’s subversive.” He wasn’t wrong. Nor was he alone in the thought.
Brandon Maxwell elevated separates to the status of jackets and ties: highly polished, but not matchy-matchy banker stripes and Prince of Wales checks. Christopher John Rogers mixed burgundy and black suiting with his brightly striped dancing dresses. Tory Burch called her collection “twisted sportswear.”
“I feel like women are defining ‘classic’ for themselves rather than having it defined for them,” Ms. Burch said backstage. Her new classics: cardigans with the sleeves sliced open, so one could be draped across the body and pinned in place, and a cropped leather jacket that was outfitted with all the pockets (credit-card holder, billfold, coin purse) of a handbag. A draped cocktail dress dangled marabou rabbit tails, as if for good luck.
Even at Carolina Herrera, where the designer Wes Gordon was inspired by the idea of a garden, the triteness of women-as-flowers in rose-bedecked minidresses and blue-sky lace (looks that are sure to move like hot cakes in Palm Beach) was offset by the cooler contrast of a strategic gold tulip on, say, a gray pinstriped jumpsuit.
“It’s more tailoring than I’ve ever done,” Mr. Gordon said backstage, and it gave his collection an oomph that made the last billowing opera coat look like a superhero’s cape. Up, up and away.
Still, no one does tailoring like Mr. Browne, who set his collection amid a host of 2,000 origami white birds meant to represent, he said in a preview, “hope.” Before his extravaganza of a finale dress, there was a flock of heritage tweeds remade as oversize coats and exacting jackets; pleated skirts, with hemlines high and low; and narrow trousers, often marked with avian intarsia and mixed with old school gingham, varsity letters and rep tie silks.
No two looks were the same, though every once in a while an hourglass dress would appear, sprouting tulle ruffles from the back but so structured from the front, it looked like a cage.
They made the rest of the collection seem like a jail break.
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