COED COUTURE
Fashion’s most rarefied realm is getting more inclusive. At the recent spring/summer 2021 Haute Couture Fashion Week, Pierpaolo Piccioli presented a new vision for Valentino—one that’s more focused on quiet beauty than overt opulence; and in a first for the brand’s couture, it was also a coed vision, with his men dressed in the same pure lines, brilliant colour and lush textures as his women. That fashion week was also notable for Kim Jones’s womenswear debut. His Fendi haute couture collection was inspired by Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s time-travelling, gender-defying protagonist in the eponymous novel. The resulting clothes—fittingly androgynous and utterly glamorous—were showcased on a star-studded cast of male and female models.