Pretty means power as flirty, feminine dressing falls back into favour with women who mean business, says
Fashion Karen Dacre
PRINCE sang “sometimes it snows in April”, and last week it did — a year to the day of the purple one’s passing — promptly propelling style plates into a state of intense discombobulation.
Immediately questions were raised. Do bare legs still look good when they turn a deathly shade of blue? Is a winter puffer worn with a pair of Birkenstocks and a (fresh new) pedi a crime against fashion or an inspired survival mechanism? One blast of cold weather and we — a collective of smart, weather-worn women who arguably should have known better than to assume that one lowly swallow (ie that balmy weekend before Easter) had made it summer — were in a state of disarray.
The result was a delay on the great annual retail phenomenon unofficially known as “the dress dash” and a halt on a two-week spell of hot retail activity during which our favourite high-street hangouts sell more floaty spring frocks than at any other time of year.
Thankfully, with temperatures back on the climb and May Day now behind us, normal service can resume. In essence, spring has sprung and this time there’s no going back.
For the high street, which lay in wait while spring endured its own identity crisis last week, the onset of the season spells interesting times ahead. Notably because the day dress, in all its brave, bold, feminine glory, is finally back en vogue. Having suffered at the hands of mid-season separates — see sawn-off jeans, anklelength cigarette pants, oversized striped shirts and an unrelenting appetite for athleisure — the day dress had fallen out of favour with some of the capital’s snappiest dressers.
Its demise, in part thanks to the fact that women battling with 21stcentury sexism were unconvinced that a yellow floral print tea dress was appropriate attire in which to embark on a personal protest, has since been flipped on its head with more and more of us coming around to the idea that femininity in its most typical and clichéd state can be just as empowering as any of Hillary Clinton’s trouser suits.
At her show in Milan in February, Miuccia Prada was convinced by precisely this idea, citing the notion of seduction and its place in a feminist society as the starting point for her autumn/winter showcase,