Save this story Save Story Save this story An exposed bra. Clothes wrinkled as if fresh from a midday tryst. A cheeky peek of derrière.
Like the ripe aroma of sweat left over in a disheveled hotel bedroom, the undeniable whiff of sex wafted over the spring 2027 collections. Of course, as one Vogue editor so astutely observed, the spring collections are almost always about sex, in some form or another. You can’t deny nature, after all, when rising temperatures inevitably coax a person to peel off their layers and reveal a titillating glimpse of flesh beneath. But this season made it clear—sex is on designers’ minds. What’s most interesting, however, is not the subject itself, but the ways each city on the fashion week circuit interpreted the erotic promise of carnal delights.
Listen, no culture is a monolith, and it goes without saying that one person’s kink is another’s turn-off. Still, certain fascinating trends coalesced around the far-flung capitals of Europe and America.
Photo: Courtesy of Emily Dawn Long New York was mostly all polish and sleek sportswear, but some younger designers shrewdly approached the subject of sex. Through their prism, it had a gritty, funky—even irreverent—attitude. In other words, that ineffable element of youthful downtown cool. Take Eckhaus Latta—purveyors of bleary knitwear and unwieldy denim—who presented a surprisingly self-assured and, yes, sexy, collection . Look at the offhanded ease of a T-shirt with rolled sleeves paired with a diaphanous, translucent skirt floating behind; airy shifts made of filmy, see-through layers; all those shoulder-baring sleeveless tops; and the oddball cool of golden netting cut into pants or a sleeveless mini dress. Sexy, sure, but rendered with an insouciant shrug and a disaffected sigh.
Emily Dawn Long, meanwhile, cut her dresses so low in the back that they exposed the upper regions of the … well … how to say this? Butt crack. (She also had keyhole jeans that pulled off a similar stunt.) She charmingly calls this “southern cleavage.” To offset it, however, she edged the revealing peekaboo in dainty little frills—the result was both provocative and a little arch. In a preview of her collection, she said something to me that felt deeply American—that being sexy shouldn’t negate a sense of humor. And if you really want to know where Dawn Long’s mind is at, perhaps consider her popular screen-printed tees, one of which reads Take Off Your Clothes.
Photo: Alessandro Viero & Gianluca Carraro / Gorunway.com Photo: Alessandro Viero & Gianluca Carraro / Gorunway.com The Milanese, meanwhile, treat sex almost as an intellectual pursuit—just think of Prada’s esoteric and erotic mystique. While Mrs. Prada and her co-conspirator Raf Simons settled on one of the most provocative garments in a woman’s wardrobe—the skirt, with its tantalizing promise to reveal a little (or a lot) of leg—they found a dizzying array of ways to present it: with tough girl leather jackets, with reserved librarian sweaters, with tomboy plaid shirts left unbuttoned, and, of course, skimpy bras. In other words, the collection was a meditation not just on the skirt as a garment, but on the innumerable ways a woman can exist in the world. In that, they presented a rich panoply of sexiness—nerdy, brazen, demure, sophisticated—and reflected the many moods and contours of female desire.
Or there was Simone Bellotti’s Jil Sander, where a study of minimalist imperfection—creased dresses, askew coats and jackets—gently hinted at a post-coitus rush, as if hurriedly leaving some clandestine liaison, haphazardly buttoning your jacket, no time to smooth away some sordid wrinkles. In that way, it brought to mind an unsavory tension that, to me, recalled the films of Antonioni or Fellini.
Photo: Courtesy of Tom Ford If sex is a condition of the mind in Milan, it’s one of the body in Paris. There we received the frank, from-the-hip approach, best expressed in Haider Ackermann’s simmering Tom Ford collection—a deadly-serious, seductive romp that’s in line with France’s confrontationally blasé approach to le sexe . It was, in a word, horny. All that slick, pettable leather, or men in sweaters and underwear which, as they passed, revealed their fully exposed buttocks, women in gowns or maillots that were slashed to reveal deep valleys of torso or miles of leg that led upwards to … you know. It was absurd, it was lewd, it was defiantly gratuitous, and it was, well, 100% Gallic.
No matter how you feel about sex—and chances are you have some feeling about it—there will be a way for you to indulge when the warm weather returns.
Source: Lifestyle
0 Comments