Milan Fashion Week has come and gone, leaving behind not just a trail of exquisite fabrics and audacious silhouettes but something far more telling: a meditation on femininity itself. Rather than agonising over whether brown has supplanted black (a perennial debate, honestly), or if hemlines are inching their way into new territory, the real story was how designers chose to articulate womanhood—its contradictions, its histories, its future.
There were pragmatists, heroines, and modern warriors, and in the hands of the right designers, provocations—questions about who fashion is for and how femininity is being wielded. Not always from a woman’s perspective, but ultimately for the woman who decides how she will choose to wear it.
Here’s who captured our imagination this season.
Prada: Subverted Femininity
We are starting out with Prada, because how could you not? One can’t have a conversation about femininity without Prada’s subverted take on the whole topic. Never one for the obvious approach, Mrs Prada and her collaborator Mr. Raf Simmons set out, not only to underscore and reframe femininity, but with it the codes of what is constituted as pretty or attractive, starting off with the onslaught of those frumpy, dowdy dresses, in widow black to saccharine shades of pink, their sweetness stunted by their purposely ill sized fit. Strangely pulled away from the body, a few sizes too big, like something you might have borrowed from your insanely chic grandmother and effortlessly repurposed, worn with the kind of disdain that only the truly self-assured possess.
Floral prints, reminiscent of chintz-covered sofas, emerged in caustic shades of pink and yellow, forcing you to reconsider everything you thought you knew about good taste. Paper-bag skirts, bunched at the waist, were nonchalantly paired with crisp poplin pajama shirts, exuding a deliberate disarray. Then came the woolly, embellished chokers—resembling cut-out collars from itchy sweaters, so compelling in…
