THE MIDI- DRESS
A return to form for the midi-dress has seen it enter the canon of go-anywhere, doanything-in-it pieces. A subtle showing-off of the waist and different renditions in shape bring the female figure subtly to the fore.
Scottish fabrics. Quality is paramount, and as the pieces are made to last there’s the bonus of sustainable credentials. Fabric-cutting, button-sewing and lapels are done by hand.
A near couture-level quality is creeping back onto readyto-wear runways, too. At Saint Laurent, Anthony Vaccarello tweaked and cajoled his tailored overcoats for six months until he achieved his ideal boxy shoulder. Elsewhere, modern essentials were repeated by major houses and upstarts alike, including the midi-dress and midi-skirt, suit trousers, trenches and tailored and duster coats.
This precision zeroing-in is mirrored in labels dedicated to timeless, hardworking clothing, like Wardrobe NYC’s capsule offerings, or the increasingly common practice of carrying over core styles at luxury houses; look simply to Gucci’s loafers or Chanel’s slingbacks. Marc Jacobs just launched The Marc Jacobs, an ongoing collection of items plucked as the best from periods of time he loves, like ‘the Grunge Sweater’ and ‘the Disco Dress’. In-house labels at luxury retailers focussing on essentials, like Raey at Matches Fashion or Moderne at La Garçonne, continue to grow.
La Garçonne founder Kris Kim, who oversees Moderne, looks back to when there were less style distractions. “One of the original points of inspiration is how children’s wear was imagined in the past,” she says. “Non-constraining and practical, but stylish.” Kim’s team produces classic shirts in small batches, tunics and stripped-back knits that are versatile and practical. Giuliva’s Cardelli says they also look to their forebears, mirroring “the way that our grandparents used to have just a few things, but they were things that lasted, and they wore the right thing to every event, [as] statement pieces in a way”.
It doesn’t equate, however, to pedestrian fashion, something Fiona Myer of local label White Story knows well. “My background is in trend forecasting, and I sensed a return to the classics,” she says. Myer launched with different iterations of the label’s namesake pieces before branching into a fully fledged label, still based on that cotton staple but with bright colours and expressive silhouettes. “Style is about creating and expressing oneself, and classics allow you to work from a clean slate.”
That slate is a scaffold from which to tweak the details and experiment on a more subtle scale. Take Clare Waight Keller’s seam-inverted shoulders that gave dimension to Givenchy’s simple day coats, or Victoria Beckham’s chain detail at the waistband of a pencil skirt, or The Row’s clever placement of multiple darts on the front of a camel mididress to sculpt the form. The result is a modernisation of wardrobe bedrock, a slow turning into the new.
“I believe the best updates occur when the original intention is considered,” says Kim. She sees timeless pieces as “the foundation of a great wardrobe, and we always go back to them no matter how the trends change from season to season”. Except this time around the trend itself becomes the classic. The choice is easy.