“We’ve Gone From Dressing to Look Good to Dressing to Feel Good”—How Fashion Is Changing for Spring 2021
What do women want? For designers that perennial question took on a new layer this season: What do women want in a pandemic? It’s no small thing the ways in which our experiences of lockdown are reshaping our needs and desires. With parts of the world entering a second quarantine, the issue will be with us for some time.
So, what do we want? My colleague Chioma Nnadi puts it best in this final episode of Good Morning Vogue’s premiere season: “We shouldn’t shy away from the joy of dressing up,” she says. “There’s this tendency to want to pare things back because we’re in this really sober moment, but in order to save our sanity, we need to remember that dressing with joy is what’s really going to lift our spirits. We’ve gone from dressing to look good to dressing to feel good.”
Of course, joy feels different to each of us. Vogue’s editors responded to many collections this season, from those of upstarts to the industry’s biggest names—Chanel, Dior, and Fendi among them. Still, themes emerged. Women designers in particular rose to the current moment. “What struck me is how they took on the bigger issues and implications of what it means to be a designer now and make clothes,” Mark Holgate says. Sustainable fabrics and responsible products are the new essentials.
Creativity is also key in this challenging time, whether that means reviving a dying craft in Nigeria (Kenneth Ize) or creating #WFH clothes with verve and spirit (Christopher John Rogers). We all cheered Donatella Versace’s new, less prescriptive take on sexy. Now, says GMV host Paloma Elsesser, who walked the Versace show in Milan, “There’s no going back.”
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