During the final of the Thom Browne show, the last show of the New York Fashion Week, a model appeared in a jacket inlaid with golden bulliaar, worn on top of 130 feet hated tweed and many layers of crinolines. The skirt was so extensive, with so many layers and curtains, it hindered her movement, as if she were weighed by all the girlish expectations.
To a certain extent, designers always struggle with the tropics of femininity – playing with them, to hug, undermine, dose with irony – but such choices seem to hurt much more in the dawn light of traditions, Barkstool Sport and Hulk Hogan. What it means to dress as a woman in the era of the ‘manosphere’ was the central question of this last New York Fashion Week.
When Macho posture is in the elevator, do you lean in ruffles and side and corsets and hobble skirts? Do you play the fainting flower or the sex kit? The princess in the tower or the pinup? Or do you do something completely different?
For example, do you think of ‘The Matriarch’, such as Rachel Scott, the founder and designer of Diotima? The collection of Mrs. Scott was for the multitasker of all multitasters, who ran the household and the family and the budget. In recent months, Mrs. Scott said that she felt that black women, but also all women, was ‘reduced, really flattened’ and denied ‘nuance, complexity and sensuality’.
So she decided to offer it to them in her characteristic mix of customization and crocheted. Gigantic fringy knitted lapels burst out of packing jackets, which covered tunics or tanks of crystal mesh, and pack pants were exchanged before silk bloomers.
Bloomers? “The first feminist underwear,” Mrs. Scott called them, and although they can read as a retrograde, they looked surprisingly good here, a bit like the precursor of jogging pants. Her ability to find the harmony, not just the tension, in the combination of Kitchen Table Craft and C-suite uniform is partly what her the Council of Fashion Designers of America Designer of the Year made in 2024.
But that was just one option for expressing identity. There were others. What was noticeable, however, women were presented as clearly sexualized objects; Snacks to enjoy.
Femininity as a fungic concept
There were women as furious survivors (or perhaps just furies) in Elena Velez, where a story of shipwrecks and marine animals was woven into cracked cotton shirting and cool pirate pants, latex-wrapped night years that clamped the body and dripping tentacles of toxic vegetables.
Anna Delvey, the society scammer whose story was made in a streaming series, opened the show in an oily skirt and single bracelet, but such stunts (such as an earlier Velez Modderwesteling or a runway dressed as a trading ‘going with’ ‘Go’ go with ‘De Wind’) are second -year distractions and obscure the very real talent of Mrs. Velez. Her clothes are a scream in the void all alone.
That is a way to be heard. Another was in Luar, where Raul Lopez called his show ‘El Pato’, who is Spanish for duck and, he said in a preview, a homosexual blemish slipped him like a teenager because of the way he walked. He wanted to recover the label and make it one thing of glory for … well, anyone else. He did that through puffers filled with feathers or brushed with them; Coats cut to stand on either side of the throat as wings or to drop a shoulder; and Grandiosis, 1980s silhouettes: big shoulders, Vatbroek.
The point: your fine is your company. (It was a better point anyway than the bodysus made with caps that lifted the arms in a weak-writings position, which were a bit on the nose.)
That may seem like a cop-out, the fashion equivalent of the Trite-Adagium that women can be everything they want, but it is also a point that is worth remembering. Femininity is a fungic concept. That’s no problem; It’s an opportunity.
Sportswear as provocation
Yet it was perhaps the most eager idea of everyone women as managers. Women under control. Well, of course: this is New York. As Michael Kors said for his show from Slouchy, Swishy Pantspacks and Oversized Shirting, when it comes to sportswear: “Let’s face it. We invented this. “
Admittedly, it is not exactly a surprise from Mr. Kors. But in the context of the moment read his refusal to set sexy equally with transparent transparent less boring and more as provocative.
“Hands in the pockets, covered,” he said. “That is subversive in a strange way.” He wasn’t wrong. Neither was he alone in the thought.
Brandon Maxwell increases itself on the status of jackets and tires: very polished, but not matchy-matchy banker stripes and prince or wales checks. Christopher John Rogers mixed Burgundy and black appropriate appropriate with his brightly striped dance dresses. Tory Burch called her collection ‘Twisted Sportswear’.
“I feel that women define ‘classic’ for themselves instead of defining it for them,” said Mrs. Burch Backstage. Her new classics: open cardigans with the sleeves, so one could get draped over the body and fixed in place, and a cracked leather jacket that was equipped with all bags (credit card holder, billfold, coin turn) of a handbag of a handbag From a handbag of a handbag of a handbag of a handbag. A draped cocktail dress dangled Marabou Rabbit Tails, as if for happiness.
Even in Carolina Herrera, where the designer Wes Gordon was inspired by the idea of a garden, the Triteess of women-as-as-powerers in rose-clerk minidresses and side with blue-sky (appearance that will certainly move if hot cakes in Palm Beach) became Compensed by the cooler contrast of a strategic gold tulip on, for example, a gray pinstriped jumpsuit.
“It is more adjustment than I have ever made,” said Mr. Gordon Backstage, and it gave his collection an OompH that looked the last wavy opera jacket like a superhero cape. Up, up and gone.
Yet nobody has been adapted like Mr. Browne, who sets his collection in the midst of a large number of 2,000 origami white birds that were intended to represent, he said in a preview: “Hope”. For his extravaganza of a final dress, a herd of heritage Tweeds had been made again as oversized jackets and demanding jackets; pleated skirts, with zoom lines high and low; And narrow pants, often marked with Aviaire Intarsia and mixed with Old School Gingham, Varsity Letters and Repie Silks.
No two looks were the same, although an hourglass dress would occur occasionally, which would sprout tulle ruffles from the back but so structured from the front, it looked like a cage.
They have made the rest of the collection look like a prison interruption.
