Squint and spring 2023 looks like a Y2K reboot filled with slip dresses, lace details, and parted leggings as far as the eye can see.
And the data would certainly confirm the “lingerie and see-through” sentiment coined by La Samaritaine’s Victoria Dartigues right after Paris Fashion Week.
According to fashion search engine Tagwalk, 59 percent of the 247 designers who walked shows during fashion month included lingerie, and a whopping 77 percent included sheer looks in their spring 2023 collection.
But to see all of this solely as ’90s nostalgia or “turn of the millennium” downsizing is an oversimplification, according to observers.
For Tiffany Hsu, Mytheresa’s vice president of women’s and children’s fashion buying, this new iteration is part of an overall movement celebrating the female form.
“They are women dressing for themselves and celebrating their feminine power,” she said, noting the popularity of styles designed to highlight the female form in a way that is “very sultry and sexy without being tacky.”
Tasteful execution and a lack of sexual charge are essential, agreed 2021 LVMH Award winner Nensi Dojaka, who believes the spring 2023 runways brought back an idea that originated in the ’90s, where “there was a lot of transparency and was somehow much more accepted.”
Showing the body “started more as a trend, it continued and is becoming a statement of empowerment and making the female body ‘acceptable’, rather than scared [of seeing it] or sexualize it,” said the London-based designer.
After decades of feminist struggles and an increased focus on making public spaces safer for women, the most revealing styles echoed the sentiment that “you have the right to be who you are and this doesn’t give others any right on you,” Laurence Dekowski agreed. , director of the lingerie and children’s fashion departments at Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche.
In her opinion, this signals an empowered consumer, no longer bound by style prescriptions or notions of age, and taking these looks to the street, designed for daytime, rather than limiting them to party wear or evening wear. night.
That too is a novel twist. Instead of coming solely from designers and their shows, “influence and agenda are driven by the street and not the other way around,” said Dr. Carolyn Mair, a behavioral psychologist, business consultant and author of “The Psychology of Fashion.” fashion”.
“One way to look at it is that people are more confident in their bodies,” she said, noting that once-narrow definitions of physical beauty have mostly faded.
At a time when “everyone feels like they can have a place at the fashion table,” saying “you can only wear lingerie if you have a ‘beautiful body’ is no longer enough,” Mair continued.
“Pride is gradually becoming the center of fashion. Pride of bodies, of their differences and their multiplicity,” agreed Paris-based designer Alice Vaillant, whose two-year-old label Vaillant revolves around form-fitting, sheer looks and lingerie details.
Nudity is an act of reappropriation, necessary to “reclaim our bodies from those who use them for their own interest,” she continued, especially coming from her “generation, which refuses to be immobilized [and] celebrates diversity and different femininities and masculinities.”
This echoed the underlying idea behind the 2014 “Exposed: A History of Lingerie” exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology Museum, which recast undergarments as shapers of not only the appearance of the female body but also of female behavior.
“The problem is not so much [showing] the woman’s body [seeing] with the gaze of the dominant, the male gaze”, continues Vaillant, who believes that pride and self-confidence are a tool for emancipation but also a vector for change.
With seduction and sexuality aside, Mair reads styles that show the body as a phase in an individual’s style, with the cursor positioned by other cues, such as the way they present themselves, their overall wardrobe, or even the cosmetics.
Take the younger generations for example, for whom playing with fashion is about “verifying their identity, navigating who they are in the world in which they exist,” he continued.
And that world is bleak. Beyond the signifiers of individuality, these lightweight looks carry “the gravity of our time,” noted fashion historian and Palais Galliera curator Alexandre Samson, be it geopolitical uncertainties, more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. 19 and related restrictions, the rise of extreme ideologies. and attacks on women’s reproductive rights.
He sketched a genealogy that spanned the spring of 2023, the debut of Ester Manas, earlier works by Atlein or Ottolinger, the transparent interactions seen in Casey Cadwallader’s Mugler and beyond, to the era of Stella McCartney, Chloé, Chantal Thomass in the ’80s and cutouts seen in Loris Azzaro’s work in the ’70s and her “made for sexual liberation” dresses.
In his view, this aesthetic is “a mirror of the culture that ushered in the globalization of fashion,” viewed with cynical hindsight as incoming generations begin to digest that era more than two decades away.
“Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, this proposition was starting to emerge,” he continued, echoing the data-driven view offered by Tagwalk, where the “transparent” tag emerges as a constant among the top tags used to describe the spring collections of leading brands since 2017, heralding the return of underwear as outerwear.
As governments tighten controls, challenging the rules through clothing can be a way to show agency and free expression in a different way.
Faced with the “regressive forces,” consumers and designers may be reacting through the extravagance and lightness of textiles and silhouettes, Dekowski speculated.
“When we lacked control, we tried to take control when and where we can, and we certainly can with our clothes, if we have the confidence to pull it off,” Mair said.
Source: news.google.com