Lace Revolution

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If you thought lace was a dusty, dainty fabric best suited for Victorian
ladies, you must have missed Beyoncé at the Grammys.

When Beyoncé strutted on to the Grammy’s stage in February, fans went wild,
and not just because her appearance was a surprise.

In true Queen B fashion, she made a show-stopping entrance in a stunning
white lace gown that just happened to be beach wedding dresses by designer Inbal
Dror.

It was feminine, yet sexy, with sheer fabric and a high collar that flirted
with her décolletage, while parallel thigh-high slits left little to the leggy
imagination.

It had a whiff of the Victorian, but still, in one look, perfectly summed up
our modern lace infatuation.

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“We had just released the ‘Formation’ video, and if you see the ‘Formation’
video, there’s a sort of Antebellum, Victorian vibe that kind of runs through
the whole video,” Marni Senofonte, Beyoncé’s stylist, told The Daily Beast.
“That dress just embodied it and was also super sexy at the same time. She
looked at it, and it was just perfect for the moment.”

Senofonte has played with the juxtaposition of making the feminine fabric
edgier both in the mix of looks Beyoncé wears—she’s a Michael Jackson-inspired
Black Panther one week, a delicate and sexy Victorian-inspired queen the
next—but also within a single look itself.

For one of Beyoncé’s tours, Senofonte made lace football jerseys with long
trains for the dancers to wear.

“[Lace] is always a symbol of femininity, but you can just use it in so many
different ways,” Senofonte said. “It just doesn’t have to be a dress. B wears
lace overalls. I love bringing lace into the most masculine [things], like a
sweatshirt, a football jersey, a hockey jersey. It really makes something so
rough [have] a gentle touch.”

Over the past several years, lace has exploded on the runways and streets
with an ephemeral vengeance.

It’s still the traditional fabric of Queen Victoria’s cavernously prude
frocks, but, today, most designers and fashionistas use it as more of a canvas
on which to play with the high-low mix of cutting-edge formalwear and combining
masculine and feminine styles.

Also, it’s inherently sexy, with a peek-a-boo nature that many style stars
love to exploit, especially in this spring’s latest look: white lace wedding
gowns.

In the past few months, Rooney Mara shined in a white lace Givenchy gown at
the Oscars; Olivia Wilde turned up to Unite4:Humanity gala in Beverly Hills in
an intricately lacedElie Saab number; Cate Blanchett wandered the streets of New
York in a white lace Jonathan Simkhai dress for her Carol press tour; and
Jessica Alba donned a flirty spring dress from Brock Collection for an event for
her Honest Company.

Even reality stars are getting in on the action. It may have been a
controversial season forThe Bachelor, but winner Lauren Bushnell looked
indisputably stunning when sheshowed up to the after-show in a sexy white lace
mini dress.

In last week’s Vanderpump Rules finale, the episode’s centerpiece party
featured all the warring lady leads, still with daggers drawn, all dressed in
floaty lace.

Today, lace is the fabric of femininity, but that wasn’t always the case.
Like most high-fashion styles, centuries ago, lace was known more for its
aristocratic connotations than a gender-specific trend.

As far back as the 16th century, “lace ruffs and lace cuffs and lace collars”
were seminal features of the high class, according to Valerie Steele, director
of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Two centuries later, that
began to change.

“It’s really in the end of the 18th, early 19th century that a lot of things
that initially read as aristocratic and luxurious, such as lace, color, jewelry,
and embroidery, became re-imagined as feminine rather than aristocratic,” Steele
told The Daily Beast.

“You no longer see men wearing pink silk suits with floral embroidery and
lace cuffs. Prior to that, there was nothing feminine about it particularly. It
was aristocratic. But then that got re-interpreted as feminine.”

While there were still fashion renegades (think Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s or
Marc Jacobs wearing a lace dress to the Met Gala in 2012), for the past century
lace has primarily been the purview of the ladies. It’s the stuff of lingerie
and wedding gowns, feminine frocks and evening wear.

One of the catalysts for its latest resurgence was the Prada Fall/Winter 2008
collection. At her Milan show that season, Miuccia Prada sent a collection down
the runway in which lace took center stage in a variety of patterns, colors, and
combinations.

Prada reimagined the possibilities for the intricate fabric and “highlighted
lace in a new way that made it look very modern,” Steele said.

“Miuccia Prada turned lace into a holy and fetishistic enterprise,” Cathy
Horyn wrote in her New York Times review of the show.

Lace was high fashion in the days of Marie Antoinette, traditionally regal
when worn by Queen Victoria, and feminine and a touch rebellious as hems crept
up during the era of the 1920s flapper. At Prada’s 2008 show, it was being
redefined as erotic and feminine for women of the 21st century.

In her review, Horyn wrote that “Lace is the fabric of women’s lives, from
christening robes to bridal gowns to widow’s weeds.”

In their past two collections, Rodarte—helmed by Kate and Laura Mulleavy--has
experimented with new ways to style and design with lace.

The label’s Spring 2016 collection, in particular, was inspired by poets and
poetry and relied heavily on lace to tell this story.

“There were so many layers of lace and I guess the only way I could think
about the way poetry is interesting is there’s so many layers to it that you
decode through time or what you’re feeling or what you understand that someone
is writing. And I guess that’s what we did,” Laura Mulleavy said in a video for
Vogue.

If lace is having a regal renaissance now, fashion’s fickleness means it may
be dethroned soon. But don’t expect it to fully fall out of favor: It has
endured for hundreds of years, after all.

“Fashion is all about change, so if it’s in this season, it’s likely to be
out if not next season than the season after,” Steele said. “But that’s just the
nature of the beast. But, almost certainly, lace will come back again. It’s just
such a unique and beautiful decorative device. In some form or another, it’s
going to stay here.”

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