We are in the era of ‘literally me’ fashion

Miuccia Prada unveiled its Fall 2023 collection in Paris on Tuesday afternoon. Women all over the world have said one thing about it on her social media. literally me. Clothing is a mix of quirky and luxe takes on blue-collar workwear, with dud-brown leather hoodies and chunky cotton Carhartt-esque jackets and mid-career pieces from the old catalogs of J. Crew and Banana Republic. A fetishized vision of work clothes was mixed. Sweater set and polka dot slip skirt. (Funny enough, the catalog that pushed such looks 10 or 15 years before her was a runway student at Mrs. Prada.) was wearing glasses. It was a little more documentarian than the Madame Prada collection tends to be, but that’s the result of her great chemistry with stylist Lotta Volkova. Together, they produce a show where a woman seems to have licked her finger, put it in the air, and picked up the slightest breeze that no one else can feel.

The whole thing was like an electric shock straight to a woman’s nervous system. rub a balloon on one’s head, felt like the perfect encapsulation of our fried energies, the difficulty of finding a balance between work and needs, the impossibility of stopping even for a moment. Tiny twin women lunge forward with beautiful little handbags in the bend of their arms. It felt like a shared nightmare. We are so busy that we hardly remember putting our pants on.

(Personally, I attended a show in an airport lounge after traveling for nearly two weeks, half of which I spent trying to nurse a rather miserable case of the flu. Watching, I could hear slow motion. In a buzzy and funny version of Kim Kardashian’s interview, she quipped, “Get your ass up and work. Nobody seems to want to work these days.”Heheheeeee!)

As I wrote earlier this week, When reviewing Loewe and Comme des Garçons, many designers didn’t seem to know what to say this season. So instead of telling us how to look better, they simply show us who we are. It’s not a common instinct for fashion designers. All current political movements, no matter which part of the spectrum, seem to boil down to one thing. It’s SEE ME. So the Miu Miu show identified some previously uncleared realities about our lives and made them clear to us. There is relief in runway empathy. Someone understands how strange, crazy and impossible this world can be!

In fashion, the runway is a sacred space of sorts. I’ve been thinking a lot about it this season, as I’ve noticed that several designers, from Rick Owens to Saint Laurent to Miu Miu, have revived the platform runway that was considered obsolete not so long ago. The idea went that models would be better off displaying their clothes on the ground, like the women walking past you on the street. It’s where silly ideas are baptized as acceptable simply by strolling back and forth. (It’s the place where designers famously christened destroyed sexy workwear as playful provocation a year and a half ago.) And by demonstrating that these distraught, overworked, weary women argue against the possibility of being chic, Mrs. Prada believes that our strange and tragic feelings are okay. I mean, how else should you feel right now? We are all doing our best!

It might be crazy to think that a luxurious maison the size of Louis Vuitton can also elicit such intimate sympathies, but it’s a feeling seen at Nicolas Ghesquière’s Fall 2023 show at the Musée d’Orsay on Monday. The designer encyclopedically examined one of the most banal concepts in world culture, the French woman’s style, and the results were anything but familiar.

Rather than sailor stripes and tiny leather jackets and ballet flats, the clothing is somehow crazy and conceptual, utterly realistic, like a snapshot of Ghesquière’s inner circle rendered by fashion’s fastest swirling machine. bottom. At one moment they were as sharp as ice, like stiff purplish glen plaid suits with cashmere ties around the neck, pinstripe dresses with skirts straight trapezoids in shock. , after a few looks, they became so soft they actually smoothed out… the runway. (Gimme Gimme!!! I thought, looking at the most amazing tight-fitting cashmere plaid jacket and bulbous herringbone trousers.)

Their precision seemed like a commentary on a collection that seeks to encapsulate a culture’s style. The way I try to make the indescribable feel precise and clear, and the way it slips off my fingertips or gets disturbed by the noise of life. Models’ heavy knits. Some of his scarves were fastened with flute and tuba brooches. Is this a reminder that we are all weird little instruments, just doing our part, but somehow when we come together we create this wonderful weird ball? It looks like harmony. Ghesquière has really been in his bag for the last few seasons. I thought, what a punk to wear high heels and pull off this crazy show in the most corporate fashion environment! , which nearly every creative person has had to compromise or sell out to survive, feels like a brave sympathy.