We’re in the Age of “Literally Me” Fashion
Miuccia Prada unveiled her Fall 2023 collection in Paris on Tuesday afternoon, and women around the world had one thing to say about it on social media: literally me. The clothes were a mix of weirdo-luxurious takes on blue collar workwear, like dud-brown leather hoodies and thick cottony Carhartt-like jackets, and a fetishized vision of middle management clothes peddled in J. Crew and Banana Republic catalogs of yore, like sweater sets and polka dot slip skirts. (Hilariously, the catalogs that pushed such looks 10 or 15 years ago were students of Mrs. Prada’s runways.) Several of the models wore the ovular glasses on which LensCrafters built a mall empire. It was a bit more documentarian than Mrs. Prada’s collections tend to be, though that’s the result of her great chemistry working with stylist Lotta Volkova; together, they produce shows that look like a woman licked her finger, put it in the air, and picked up the slightest breeze no one else could feel.
The whole thing was like an electric shock straight to women’s nervous systems. The models’ slightly frazzled hair, achieved backstage by rubbing a balloon against their heads, felt like a perfect encapsulation of our fried energy, the difficulty of finding balance between our work and our needs, the impossibility of stopping for even a second. And those women with their perfectly bourgeois little twinsets, charging forward with their beautiful little handbags in the crook of the arm—except, wait, they’re only wearing underwear and tights? That felt like a shared nightmare. We’re so busy we can barely remember to put on our pants.
(Personally, I took in the show in the airport lounge after traveling for nearly two weeks, half of which I spent attempting to nurse a pretty wretched case of the flu, and I felt like as I watched I could hear a slow-mo, oozy fun-house version of that Kim Kardashian interview in which she says, “Get your f—ing ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days.” Heheheeeee!)
As I wrote earlier this week, when reviewing Loewe and Comme des Garçons, many designers seemed unsure of what to say this season. What made Miu Miu’s show so spectacular is that it showed exactly what a designer can do in a moment like this: not tell us how to be or look better, but simply show us ourselves. That’s not a common instinct for a fashion designer, but it’s so appropriate to our times, which are both exceedingly vain and exceedingly hostile. Every political movement right now, on any part of the spectrum, seems to boil down to one thing: SEE ME. So the Miu Miu show identified some previously unarticulated reality about our lives, and revealed it to us. It allows you to exhale—there is a relief in the runway’s empathy. Someone understands how strange and screwed up and impossible this world is!
In fashion, the runway is a kind of sacred space of validation. I thought about that a lot this season as I noticed that several designers, from Rick Owens to Saint Laurent to Miu Miu, brought back the platform runway that not long ago was considered passe. Better to show clothes on the ground, like the model is a woman passing you on the street, the thinking went. But the runway is a place where faux pas become the coolest things, where the most daring and ridiculous ideas are baptized as acceptable merely by taking a walk back and forth. Putting the models back up on that raised walkway underscores that it’s the magic space of transformation. (It’s where the designer famously christened destroyed and sexed-up workwear as a playful provocation a year and a half ago!) And by showing these distraught, overworked, tired women insisting against the odds on being chic, Mrs. Prada seemed to be telling us that our weird and tragic feelings are A-OK. I mean, how else are you supposed to feel right now? We’re all just doing our best!
It might sound funny to think that a luxury house at the scale of Louis Vuitton could also elicit such intimate empathies, but that’s just what I felt watching Nicolas Ghesquiere’s Fall 2023 show at the Musee d’Orsay on Monday. The designer took an encyclopedic look at French woman style, which is one of the most cliched concepts in global culture, but the results were anything but overfamiliar.
Rather than sailor stripes and little leather jackets and ballet flats, the clothes were somehow at once crazy and conceptual, and completely realistic, like snapshots of Ghesquiere’s inner circle rendered by the fastest whirring machine of fashion. One moment they were sharp as ice, like a stiff purplish glen plaid suit with swath of cashmere at the neck or a pinstripe dress whose skirt was shocked into a scared-straight trapezoid, and a few looks later they went exceedingly soft, practically smooshing down the runway. (Gimme gimme!!! I thought, seeing the most wonderful snuggly cashmere plaid jacket and bulbous herringbone trousers.)
Their precision almost seemed like commentary on collections that try to encapsulate a culture’s style—how we attempt to make something ineffable feel precise and defined, and how quickly that slips out of our fingertips or gets interrupted by the noise of life. Several of the models’ chunky knit scarves were pinned with a flute or tuba brooch, as if to remind us that we’re all just weird little instruments, playing our parts, and yet somehow, when we come together, we create this fabulous oddball harmony. Ghesquiere has really been in his bag these past few seasons, and as I watched all the glam celebrity guests around me take in things like a dress with a frustum-shaped bodice that fell into a crazy wobbly skirt, with no soundtrack except the exaggerated clacking of high heels, I thought, how punk to pull off this crazy show in the most corporate fashion environment! And in our increasingly corporatized world, where nearly every creative person has had to compromise or sell out to survive, that feels like valiant empathy.
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