A year of statements
From Melania Trump’s stilettos to Meghan Markle’s style, it was an interesting year for fashion, writes Melissa Singer.
Normally, when one examines the past year through different prisms – politics, entertainment, sport – they come up with vastly different lists. But no year in recent history has provided as much overlap between the political, the social, the artistic and the fashionable as 2017.
Starting in January, when the day after the Presidential inauguration thousands of women in cities across the United States donned handmade pink ‘‘p...y hats’’ as a symbol of solidarity and protest against the Trump administration and the policies and views about women of the man himself. In the days that followed, Italian fashion house Missoni dressed its models in the symbol, which set a rhetoric of ‘‘fashion as armour’’ as the world dressed itself for these dark, uncertain times.
The signs were everywhere – the resurgence of military, 1980s shoulder pads and the Danish-led hygge (pronounced ‘‘hue-guh’’) boom, which saw us trade our 2016 party frocks for a cosy jumper dress and a mug of almond chai.
This year, ‘‘fashion as politics’’ was also a recurring thread, whether it was mastheads boycotting photographers accused of sexual assault, to the manifestation of Melania Trump as First Lady.
A flurry of designers said they would/would not dress the First Lady , – Dolce & Gabbana was in the ‘‘for’’ camp and Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs ‘‘against’’.
But the relationship between the brash Italians and the White House hit a bump when Trump attended an economic forum in Italy in May wearing a $US51,000 (NZ$71,800) Dolce & Gabbana jacket. Not exactly the best look for someone expected to show an interest in collective belttightening.
In other ways, fashion read the temperature of the times positively. We saw greater diversity than ever on the runway, including in Australia, where the Melbourne Fashion Festival and David Jones both sent 60-year-old women down the catwalk to whooping and whistling – of the right kind.
The year also saw older women emerge as style icons, including, most unexpectedly, Celine Dion, who stole the limelight at Paris Fashion Week in a series of devilmay-care outfits not seen since the diva wore a backwards tuxedo to the 1999 Oscars.
Though the biggest ‘‘young at heart’’ moment went to Donatella Versace, who convinced five of the original ‘‘supers’’ to close her September show to commemorate 20 years since the murder of her brother, Gianni.
And Cindy Crawford’s daughter, Kaia Gerber, led the next generation of models into fashion’s future of greater androgyny, ‘‘see now, buy now’’, and a growing focus on sustainability.
Still there were some hiccups. In November, Victoria’s Secret was shunned for not featuring any curvy women in its annual spectacular.
Meanwhile, the sexual harassment and abuse stories tumbling out of the entertainment industry cast a pall over the fashion world as well, and hemlines started getting lower as a statement.
And then there’s the royal wedding. Not since Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956 has the world gorged on a fairytale love story as much as the union of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.
Who knows what will 2018 bring but this week’s Golden Globes gave us a hint when several actresses wore black to protest against sexual abuse.