Couture always falls in January, but it seemed particularly fitting this year to gaze upon the world’s most rarified and expensive clothes just a week after the U.S. inaugurated a new oligarchy. That rightward shift is not just confined to the U.S. — it’s a global phenomenon — and while fashion will take some time to fully reflect that culture, we’re already seeing it on the runways.
Last year, I reported on the incoming aesthetic of “opulent simplicity,” defined by, as Pantone Color Institute VP Laurie Pressman described it, “luxury reminiscent of a bygone era.” Think eighties, Lacroix-era excess — a heteronormative tableaux of women in satin and sequins for evening and suits with miniskirts for day, men in penguin tuxedos and boxy, double-breasted jackets. Trend forecaster Sean Monahan has called it the “boom boom” aesthetic. It comes in rich shades of espresso, purple, green, and red, juxtaposed with pastels. As Monahan wrote, “[M]ale-coded values people thought had been left in the dustbin of history… have come roaring back.”
Did John Galliano’s 2024 Margiela couture collection touch off a corset and pannier craze in fashion? Or are couture designers unwittingly reaching much further back in time to expand the notions of what the boom boom look can be? Christian Dior Creative Director Maria Grazia Chiuri drew inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, originally published in 1865. She said she was also inspired by the trapeze silhouette Yves Saint Laurent designed for the house in 1957 following Dior’s death. “I discovered that his idea for this collection was children’s clothes scaled up,” she told Vogue, which also cited as her inspiration “the shape of 17th-century tailcoats, Edwardian leg-of-mutton puffed sleeves, a version of Christian Dior’s 1947 Bar jacket, and lots of tiered capes.” On Instagram, Chiuri shared her inspiration: news clippings from 1957, a year when many women were confined to domestic life, unable to open a credit card without their husbands’ signatures.
To be fair, a brand like Dior is expected to draw from the past. It’s “codes” and heritage enable it to mark bags that costs $57 to produce up to $2,800 (50x!). Chiuri has had her misses at Dior, but has overall done a pretty good job of not making her collections look ripped from the history books. That wasn’t the case with her latest show’s panniers, crinolines, and cage dresses, which left the models with little to do with their hands but awkwardly hold their skirts. This made them look child-like as intended, but also disempowered.
Daniel Roseberry’s Schiaparelli has been a favorite of internet commenters and the very important clients responsible for 40 percent of luxury clothing sales that have replaced editors on front rows. I confess to being drawn to Roseberry as a designer — we’re both from Texas, he seems talented and professional, I found it utterly charming when he designed his sister’s wedding dress. But I struggle with his Schiaparelli, which revolves around highly structured, brutally uncomfortable-looking pieces like breastplates and corsets.
This couture show incorporated restrictive corsetry and molding into a majority of looks. My friend and fellow Substacker Dana Thomas wrote on Instagram, “Schiaparelli was beautiful, but I really wish male designers [would] stop abusing women by strapping and cinching them in corsets. It’s been a hundred years since suffragettes managed to rid themselves of this torturous garment. ONE HUNDRED YEARS.”
Roseberry cast the collection as a technical challenge for him as a designer. Sure, it’s probably not easy to create a dress that hangs off the body precisely to reveal a woman’s breasts, or to form what looked like miniature bosoms over the models’ hips. He told Vogue he was trying to show clothes that possessed “antiquity and modernity at the same time.” I’d argue the former overshadowed the latter, but if the VICs love it, why deviate?
Chanel.com said its couture collection was “inspired by the idea of infinite movement.” The brand is without a creative director (Matthieu Blazy starts in April) so you could give them a pass for such meaninglessness. However, the onslaught of tweed suits with miniskirts in pastels with accents of rich purples and reds was reminiscent of, as the Daily Mail recently called them, “Mar-a-Lago ‘It’ Girls,” who are “allergic to long skirts.” (When Anna Wintour went from London to New York to take over House and Garden in 1987, she was, as a child of Swinging London, such a fan of mini-skirts that staff went out and bought them to remain in her good graces.)
Armani Privé’s show marked Giorgio Armani’s twentieth couture anniversary, and the whole affair was very late capitalist boom boom: it was used to open Palazzo Armani in Paris in the ritzy 8th arrondissement, which will serve as a couture atelier, design studio, and offices. He called the show “Lumières,” citing “light” as an inspiration. Sure! Who can take issue with… sparkles? Armani shows always look, to me, like a brand targeting older women who love jackets, though there were some nice red-carpet gowns this time, one of which will likely end up on front-row guest Demi Moore at the Oscars. Many looks were accessorized with little twenties-inspired headpieces, which I found mostly attractive if eerie in their connotations.
From light, we go to darkness: Alessandro Michele’s fourth collection for Valentino and his first couture effort came with a trailer evocative of body horror Oscar contender The Substance. He leaned hard into panniers, while some of the silhouettes looked downright Elizabethan (a period that dates back to 1558) or Marie Antoinette-ish (she became queen in 1774). Juxtaposing the huge hoop skirts and abundant ruffles with a digital background may have been an attempt to present this aesthetic in a modern light, but rather than it coming off as subversive and cool, it felt like Big Tech looming in the background of a very, very old idea of womanhood.
Speaking of just that: at the Inauguration, First Daughter Ivanka Trump wore a forest green Dior skirt suit inspired by Christian Dior’s 1950 couture collection, before changing into a recreation of a 1954 couture gown by Hubert de Givenchy that Audrey Hepburn wore in Sabrina. “What do these clothes say?” my friend and fashion journalist Raquel Laneri asked in her Substack Wearable Art. “I’m pretty. I’m popular. I’m rich. I’m a movie star (like Audrey Hepburn), a celebrity, and I have my pick of the finest clothes in the world."
Couture designers have no reason to shy from their clothes transmitting this very message, though I do wonder which couture clients really want to wear bulky hoop skirts. In her Dior review for Vogue, Sarah Mower pointed out that editing that stuff out is what their money is for: “Even if not everything makes sense… at haute couture, the whole point is that those who can afford it can have everything they dream of.”
Loose Threads
Peter Copping made his debut as Lanvin creative director during Paris Men’s Fashion Week — even though the majority of the looks in the show were women’s. Showing during men’s week surely gave his debut more publicity than it would have received during the women’s shows. I thought the coats, embellished purple dress, and red ribbon dress were standouts, and found the prints disappointing. Your thoughts?
Also capitalizing on the strategy of showing women’s ready-to-wear not during women’s ready-to-wear were Jacquemus and Toteme. Jacquemus was also inspired by the 1950s (what’s next, poodle skirt core??). Meanwhile, Toteme presented the expected lineup of black, cream, and beige, with just about everything oversized except the over-the-knee boots.
Diesel designer Glenn Martens is Maison Martin Margiela’s next creative director, succeeding John Galliano. (Margiela and Diesel have the same parent company, OTB, run by Renzo Russo.)
Saint Laurent is still leaning into suiting, suiting, and more suiting, only it was hard to see anything but the thigh-high leather boots in Anthony Vaccarello’s latest men’s show. Reported Jacob Gallagher in the New York Times: “Almost every model who looped around the runway wore some incomparably altitudinal thigh-highs.”
Chiara Ferragni (née The Blonde Salad) will be tried in Italy for fraud. In 2023, she was fined $1.14 million by Italian authorities over sales of Ferragni-branded Pandoro Christmas cakes in packaging that mentioned a children’s hospital, allegedly duping consumers into thinking that buying the cakes would benefit the hospital. She’s also being accused of doing something similar with a different children’s charity via Easter eggs. She’s admitted to “a communications error,” but denied criminal wrongdoing.
Coinciding with new drops of her Khy clothing line (remember that?), Kylie Jenner has been out and about at the couture shows. She wore a white tweed mini skirt and matching cropped jacket to Chanel, which was much more modern than other paid spokespeople like Dua Lipa, who wore a black cape and big floppy bows and looked like a little girl dressing up as Gal Gadot in the Snow White reboot.
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Feels like a lot of designers are referencing body horror, whether couture or RTW. A sartorial manifestation of the times. I also loved Vaccarello copping to not ever wanting to wear those boots, which tbh look great for haute fly-fishing
“the shape of 17th-century tailcoats, Edwardian leg-of-mutton puffed sleeves, a version of Christian Dior’s 1947 Bar jacket, and lots of tiered capes.”
So, the worst of all history? Minus the Bar jacket.