Wow, that’s one way to hip check someone, I thought, when the first look of the Alaïa show appeared.
The designer Pieter Mulier had dropped the waistbands of his skirts below the belly button and then added a sort of inflatable doughnut inside, so the result resembled a cross between a futuristic pannier and a hula skirt, swaying back and forth with each step. It was both mesmerizing and startling. And, it transpired, a sign of what was to come.
This is turning into the season of the power curve: giant, rounded shoulders; enormous, overblown ruffles; hips that stick out far beyond their natural width; even collars that arch generously up and out. Any distortion of the silhouette, in other words, that creates a sort of in-your-face hourglass and is an answer to the overblown “masculine energy,” as Mark Zuckerberg called it, that has been emerging in the world beyond the runways. The alternative movement, because that’s how it has started to seem, began in Milan at Prada, with Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ embrace of the unflattering, and it is only picking up steam
If the 1980s gave us the linebacker shoulder, made to break the glass ceiling (or at least try to), this redefines that idea for a new era; softening the edges, embracing the cliché of female curves and recasting it as a challenge. Rather than masculinizing the female body, it supersizes it and makes it undeniable; transforms it into an instrument for occupying space.
“It’s blown up, it’s magnified, it’s taken to the extreme,” summed up Chemena Kamali at Chloé in a preview. In her chiffon and lace shirting, via frills and frippery and the occasional lace peplum, the result took what could have read as fragility and turned it into assertiveness. That’s a sort of fashion alchemy that is hard to resist (and more convincing, anyway, than the free-floating nightie dresses she also favors).
Just as the big rounded shoulders in leather motorcycle jackets and jersey moto dresses in a very good Off-White show gave that brand a structure it had been lacking. And as the inflated totems of girlishness — the ginormous ruffles and ridiculously oversize satin bras worn as shirts — at Vaquera seemed less like gimmicks and more like a throwdown.
“For at least some women, that feels like power,” said Daniel Roseberry, Schiaparelli’s artistic director. He was talking backstage before a show that took the twisted glamour of his celebrated couture and grounded it for ready-to-wear without losing its megawatt imagination. After seasons in which Mr. Roseberry had tried to hide that light under an everyday bushel, it was a welcome reset.
Because, he went on, “It’s not really about sexuality.” It’s not about inviting the male gaze. (With this collection, he said, he was trying to imagine a world that existed without the male gaze.) Rather, it’s about what he called “control and choice and agency” over one’s body. It’s belted baroque leather suits that blouse out at the bust and hips under shearling spread collars so wide they look like wings, or a jacket with lavish half moon sleeves.
And it’s a step forward from the corsets that popped up as one of the more unfortunate trends of the couture shows earlier this year (especially at Schiaparelli). A power curve achieves the same visual effect without the pain or the forced reshaping of the body that corsetry achieves through boning and laces. Instead, it uses proportion and some strategic padding to manipulate what you see.
In case anyone missed the point, Mr. Roseberry collaged an image of a lace bustier, like the ghost of femininity past, to the front of a black suit — with ski-jump shoulders and hips given an extra oomph via hidden puffs of Neoprene. Imagine structure without the stiffness.
That’s why the classic mega shoulders in Stella McCartney’s ode to the ambitions of 1980s working girls seemed old-fashioned, rather than exciting, even written in tailoring and jersey and staged in an open-plan corporate environment complete with desktop computers and landline phones (in case anyone wondered what decade we were in). Yes, we’re back in the office, but do we really have to go back there? Though the male pole dancer who closed the show was an apropos touch.
Still, no one treated the whole idea of curves quite as sculpturally, and strangely, as Mr. Mulier at Alaïa, who did not limit himself to the hip but explored the whole “topography of the female form through curves and padding, through layers that act like an armor to shield,” as he wrote in his show notes.
That meant circlets that echoed those hip doughnuts on shoulders, built from layer upon layer of knit ruffles (a reference to the ruffles that Azzedine Alaïa often used), so they looked like monster-truck tires, the fashion version, or a remnant from a production of “All’s Well that End’s Well.” Maybe a Slinky or three? Some were even made from ropes of leather.
It also meant bolero jackets cut to bend elegantly from throat to waist, and more of those doughnuts added to hoods and framing the face. The waist was often left exposed, creating the effect of a corset through negative space. There was barely a straight line in the show.
Some of it was silly, especially the tops made from what looked like nylon stockings that trapped the arms, which is the opposite of empowering. A lot of it was technically fascinating. A lot also would be challenging to wear (who really wants to add more material to their hips?). It was hard to decide if the vibe Mr. Mulier was going for was sci-fi royalty or sci-fi nun or sci-fi belly dancer. Maybe it didn’t matter.
Either way, it was original. Either way it suggested the term “body-con” might refer not to “Hey, big boy” skintight somethings but to consciousness of the body within. And either way, big feminine energy was in the room.
