READY FOR BATTLE
For SS19, designers armed women with a wardrobe for warriors. We explore the trend
THIS SEASON, DESIGNERS ARE ARMING WOMEN WITH a WARDROBE for WARRIORS – BECAUSE true STRENGTH LIES in VULNERABILITY. KATIE FINNIGAN EXPLORES the BRAVE NEW MOOD
The Cambridge English Dictionary defines armour as ‘strong covering that protects something, especially the body’. While no woman would fare well going into physical battle wearing anything from the SS19 collections, references to the silhouettes of mythical goddesses and sci-fi stars were a recurring theme. Breastplates, pointed shoulders, fierce protrusions, chainmail harnesses, cocooning volume, tough boots, dominant jewellery and heavy belts suggested a wardrobe for warriors.
The trend was so pervasive that fashion search engine Tagwalk added ‘armour’ as a new tag this season. ‘The tags “dominatrix” and “warrior” have been used a lot, too,’ says founder Alexandra Van Houtte. ‘But armour was a new one for us this season. It came in strong.’ At Alexander McQueen, laser-cut leather apron skirts, tailcoats and tailoring (which came with body harnesses) were grounded by sturdy boots and worn with Viking braids. At Balmain, Olivier Rousteing riffed on Paris’s relationship with Ancient Egypt, showing alien-nation pointed shoulders and metallic corsetry-like breastplates. His tiny dresses and tailoring crafted out of what looked like shattered mirrors were the costume of a robo-cop soldier and bring to mind a line from Naomi Alderman’s 2O17 Baileys Prize-winning novel, The Power: ‘She sendeth her lightning even unto the ends of the earth.’
By the end of the Chloé show, the beachy, ‘modernist hippy’ who opened proceedings had morphed into a warrior goddess in classical Fortuny-style pleated dresses, pulled in by harnesses studded with stones. Designer Natacha Ramsay-Levi was inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film Medea, starring Maria Callas as the murdering sorceress of Greek mythology.
Things took a more apocalyptic turn at Rick Owens, where models were encased in jackets with long protrusions, protected by scaffold headdresses and blackout eye masks. Owens could have been dressing a platoon of Katniss Everdeens for a return trip to the Capitol.
But this was not simply the haute version of last season’s Warcore, the streetwear micro-trend that saw balaclavas and anti-ballistic army vests taken up by designers. The SS19 womenswear offering had a more female declaration of intent. Tough was counterbalanced with soft. The goddess-y dresses at Chloé were entirely romantic, Balmain’s famous #Army was forever sexy, and Christopher Kane’s ‘armour’ was constructed from pleated French lace. ‘It was not just toughness or just softness, but the two combined,’ says Van Houtte. ‘It felt like there was a melting pot of different interpretations on the new power women deserve.’
Case in point: for the genesis of the McQueen collection – where black leather pieces were strapped over fragile lace dresses and skirts or painted with bright flowers – creative director Sarah Burton took her team on a field trip around England’s ancient West Country. There, they took in the white horse chalk figures near Avebury, standing stones, a burial mound and poppy fields. It was a pagan woman’s pilgrimage; a life cycle, almost. ‘I didn’t just want to be about this woman who is powerful,’ Burton said backstage in Paris after the show. ‘I wanted it to be about the journey of a woman’s life: of death, marriage, sisterhood, community and the idea that you can be powerful by expressing emotion. So you don’t have to put up a guard and pretend we are not emotional; that as women, we don’t feel something. This is where it started… A strength and a fragility; a soft and a hard.’
For Ida Petersson, womenswear buying director at Browns Fashion, this made for a standout season where designers embraced what their brands stood for. ‘Valentino presented divine dresses that, although fluid, felt powerful,’ she says. ‘Both Clare Waight Keller at Givenchy and Casey Cadwallader at Mugler redefined their brand message
“IT’S NOT JUST TOUGHNESS or JUST SOFTNESS, BUT THE TWO COMBINED ”
“WHAT UNITED DESIGNERS was THEIR WILLINGNESS TO SEARCH for an EXPRESSION of FEMALE POWER ”
by delivering collections for a powerful woman who balances the traditionally feminine with the masculine. Design collective Materiel also delivered a perfect blend of soft and hard, which translated into a very strong collection.’
You can read too much into fashion; ask too much of it, hope too much of it. But in the wake of the #MeToo campaign, the industry gathered together. The build-up to the Kavanaugh proceedings in Washington ran concurrent with the shows in both Milan and Paris, providing a socio-political soundtrack few people wanted to switch off. Opinions were voiced; answers were being sought. The grim-faced Rick Owens show that took place on the same day that Dr Christine Blasey Ford gave testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing defined a mood that was coincidental to the day, but not to the times.
What united certain designers was their willingness to search for an expression of female empowerment that reflected the times: what do women want to wear now? Christopher Kane, with his sister Tammy, turned to sex, in both the animal kingdom and the animal magnetism of Marilyn Monroe. The panels of his lace dresses were inspired by an unlikely source – the crotch of a piece of lingerie he’d found. ‘I took these crotches and made them in a beautiful lace, almost like anatomical armour,’ he said at the time of the show. ‘I just wanted them to look almost like hearts – strong.’
In a year that saw novelists Madeline Miller and Pat Barker enjoy bestselling success with their retellings of the classics (Circe and The Silence of the Girls respectively), Max Mara’s Ian Griffiths took inspiration from Emily Wilson’s recent translation of The Odyssey
– the first in English by a woman. He used it as a starting point to retell the classics (and a classic wardrobe, of course) from a female point of view. It was done with a light touch, imagining, as Griffiths revealed in the show notes, ‘a modern Amazonian: proud, fierce and valiant… With her crossbody bag, one-shouldered shirt, skirt knotted at the waist and intrepid-looking sunglasses, she’s armed for adventure; scorching deserts, rolling oceans, a hunt for a polycephalous sea monster, or just a rainy trip across town to the office.’
Almost six months later, as these collections roll out into stores, women are still heading to the office, and still hunting metaphorical sea monsters – they are not easily fought, but the seascape is shifting. In November, a record number of women were elected to Congress in the US mid-term elections. Meanwhile, a swathe of feminist writing responding to patriarchal attitudes continues to be delivered – most recently Jeanette Winterson’s Courage Calls to
Courage Everywhere, Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and Michelle Obama’s Becoming,
accompanied by a sell-out tour. In 2O2O, look out for Sensuous Knowledge: A Radical
Black Feminist Approach for Everyone from Minna Salami, founder of the blog MsAfropolitan.
When it comes to the representation of women, the media has started to respond. Last autumn, we discovered the first female Dr Who, while this spring we’ll see Brie Larson as the first woman Captain Marvel. Even as fashion month was still playing out, BBC Three’s Killing
Eve was gaining traction as the female-driven show of 2O18. Writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge gave a masterclass in female characterisation, with Jodie Comer’s deadpan assassin Villanelle and peed-off hunter Sandra Oh engaged in a witty, thrilling cat-and-mouse chase. Nothing on TV has embodied the idea of fashion’s current hard/soft trend as much as Villanelle at a psychiatric appointment in a pink Molly Goddard dress and Balenciaga bovver boots.
With Fleabag and Big Little Lies returning this year, we will continue to see stories where women are in charge of their own narrative. But is fashion taking up that same mantel? Will we see it in the way we dress? Van Houtte thinks so. ‘Last season, women were empowered by masculine clothes,’ she says. ‘This season empowers women without making them look like dolls. And they don’t have to dress like men anymore to look strong.’
On the streets, this will filter down into an emphasis on the waist via belts, tailored and peplum jackets (look for those sharp shoulders), shirts and blouses tucked into high-waisted trousers and fluid dresses worn with tailoring. But Petersson casts a word to the wise on overprescriptive styling: ‘Ideally, I wouldn’t want to set rules on how to wear it. What I love most about this mood is the power is in your hands.’