Capes and Breastplates

[weddingneedさん]

Fashion month finally came to an end last week (or fashion 1.3 months, if you
include men’s as well as women’s wear). It was a season of transition and
self-examination, as designers posed questions about the point of the shows
themselves, but certain trends stood out, both in style and substance, across
the gender continuum. Vanessa Friedman, the women’s fashion critic of The New
York Times, and Guy Trebay, the men’s wear critic, discuss the most notable of
those trends and debate their significance.VANESSA FRIEDMAN: Guy, now that a
number of brands have announced they are going to show men’s wear with women’s
wear next season — and that, in fact, some are already showing women in men’s
clothes, and men in women’s — I was wondering if you thought we were going to
see chaos on the runways, or if things would get more coherent instead. Do men’s
wear and women’s wear really inform and speak to each other? Put another way:
Did you see on the men’s runways what I was seeing on the women’s?

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Which was, if I had to pick one trend to start, a certain dualism
betweenfemale sexuality, as embodied by lingerie dressing, and female power, as
embodied by — of all things — the leather breastplate. I’m serious about this.
Even Undercover had a gold breastplate. When Jun Takahashi and Nicolas
Ghesquière at Louis Vuitton are on the same page, you’ve got to think
something’s going on.GUY TREBAY: It’s funny. You see power in the breastplate,
and I see anxiety. There was an awful lot of armoring and concealment in both
the men’s and women’s shows for fall. Military references ranged from the
now-ubiquitous camouflage patterns to fairly literal interpretations of garments
like greatcoats or cavalry tunics, as at Dries Van Noten and Balmain. Ditto all
the capes, which had previously fallen out of use except by the police, the
military and at Sherlock Holmes re-enactments. While I wouldn’t necessarily go
so far as to link November’s terrorist attacks in Paris to the stuff we saw on
so many runways, designers are clearly as susceptible to these fears as anyone
else; they seep into the collective consciousness and are expressed in
design.Conversely, the trend to mix sexes in current collections doesn’t give me
the jitters.

It may be designers are trying to make sense of the breakdown in traditional
binaries. Equally, it could also be that brands are pressuring them to build
collections reflective of the gender-agnostic way a lot of young people already
dress.VF: Capes! You said it. They were everywhere on the women’s runways, too:
long, short, sparkling, wool. I think you’re right to connect this to the recent
attacks, at least abstractly (a free-floating sense of nerves, the desire for
protection, the search for safety, and so on), and I’d go even further and throw
the American election in there as well. It’s all contributing to a general sense
that things are getting very messy all over, and that we need to buckle down and
button up, literally. While I agree this is partly a defensive measure — we all
feel more secure when we are strapped in — I also think it has a warrior aspect
to it that is more active. Boudicca and the Amazons kept popping into my mind,
and for women’s wear that connotes strength and self-sufficiency, which is no
bad thing.The other big outerwear strain happening over the last month was
therenaissance of the puffer jacket, driven by fashion’s new faux revolutionary
darling, Vetements, and its insistence on the virtues of the street. (Speaking
of Vetements, it may also bear some responsibility for the men’s/women’s merger
since it has always had both sexes on its runway.) The elevation of streetwear
is, of course, nothing new in fashion, which loves to co-opt a bit of rough
whenever it can, but there’s no question sweatshirts, especially with logos that
pretend to be anti-establishment so the establishment can wear them and feel
good, and down jackets are having a moment.

Personally, I liked the opera cape-cum-puffer Demna Gvasalia, who is a member
of the Vetements collective, did in his debut as creative director of Balenciaga
best, as it was both elegant and had less pretensions to “basic.” So here’s my
question for you: cape or puffer?Continue reading the main storyFROM OUR
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GT: Ha! Cape or puffer: a question for the ages. I’m always looking at shows
and thinking about which things will never make it into production. I felt that
way about, say, the piebald pony cape at Gucci or the denim “Querelle” version
at Prada. But I’m probably mistaken. Lord knows, I’ve called things wrong
before. (I thought the fur-lined Gucci mules from Alessandro Michele’s debut
collection were absurd. And they were — so absurd they became an unstoppable
best seller.)

I’m actually pleased to see puffers elevated to runway status, partly because
I enjoy it when designers are in dialogue with the everyday, rethinking staples
or recasting the familiar. Todd Snyder is particularly skilled at this. (There’s
a reason he’s huge in Japan.) So, when you strip away the styling, is Hedi
Slimane, who designed a corduroy car coat a season or so just like one I had in
sixth grade.

Now I have a question for you, one involving another way in which men’s and
women’s wear are in dialogue: Was the Rick Owens Mastodon show — which presaged
in January many of the motifs he repeated in February for women — as memorable
for you as it was for me? I felt that of all the creators whose work we saw last
season, his was perhaps most rigorously engaged with pure design.

VF: Rick’s collection was certainly the most overtly engaged with the sense
of global implosion that seems to be driving so much of the clothes for next
season, though from what I have seen, the women’s collection was both softer and
more purposefully graceful than the men’s, as if he had reached a certain kind
of resolution. Indeed, I think it was one of the prettiest collections he’s done
yet, and “pretty” is not a word I normally associate with Rick Owens. But it
left me feeling hopeful, which is a gift of sorts.

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One last question for you, since you brought up Hedi Slimane, whose women’s
show was like stepping back in time to the go-go 1980s for me: Are you seeing
the same revival I am, big shoulders, brassy personalities and all, and do you
also think it has to do with a sense of the end of the American era? It feels
very costume party-nostalgia to me, which I don’t find particularly interesting.
If I have to wear something that defines a time period, even a hard one, I’d
rather it not reflect where we have been, but where we are going, like Rick’s
show. For me, that’s the point of this whole exercise.