The new fashion woman has good sex
Thoughts on where style is heading
Phoebe Philo’s work at Celine is still referenced for how it moved fashion culture. For anyone who really followed her, the collections felt like tectonic plates fusing together for the first time because she made clothes to appeal to the inner life of a woman. To convey how she needed to feel in these clothes as their first order priority. How they looked came second.
But the reason I think it worked so well is because we were in the middle of a huge cultural shift punctuated by the popularization (and cool-ification) of therapy. Our own psychic lenses were turning inwards to better understand who we are beneath the surface, so in a way, Philo became a harbinger for an emotional revolution that was much bigger than her.
For years we’ve been talking about the death of trends — we’ve called it a product of modern life and resolved that because the internet is so vast, because it has so many poignant but disparate corners, microtrends are the new macrotrend. But now I’m thinking it’s not so much that trends are dead as it is how the lens of the focus that captures the trends has deepened.
In other words, what I believe has actually been in motion since Philo’s initial reign at Celine — why even she has been unable to fill her own shoes — is a seismic shift in where big trends take place. Not on the surface of a woman’s body but within the woman and the sometimes insidious, often expansive interior worlds that she erects for herself.
We are in a new era.
And in this era, the most meaningful trends don’t signal exterior status. They tell of rich inner-lives. This shift is why I suspect we’ve become so neurotic about articulating and breaking down and teaching and learning personal style.
Through personal style you get to convey the richness of your inner-life.
Until now, these lives have been informed by an innate curiosity about the arts (be they fine arts, be they books; never has it been so fashionable to read) met by understated sophistication and a subtle, restrained but extremely poignant interest in clothes.
These lives have been heralded by brands like The Row, often cited as the succeeding Philo-torch holder.
On the surface, this interiority has looked like minimalism, which was exciting and dynamic to witness and partake in for so many years because even though the clothes were simple, they appealed to the moment and reflected how a mature woman wanted her interiority to be perceived.
More often these days, the same kinds of clothes read as flat or dull because we’ve reached our culmination with them. Because the woman is ready to unfold otherwise areas of her nuclear richness.
And what I feel coming through most acutely surrounds the fantasies and mysteries and desires — the erotic material that laces her sexual, innerlife.
I don’t mean this as literally as she has good sex. She might — but the conceit behind the transmission is driven by her curiosity and unapologeticism. By the peace she has made with what turns her on.
She nurtures and studies this part of herself. She respects it and wants to celebrate it, to convey it through her dress.
And much the same way she did not dress like the caricature of an intellectual in her minimalist era, she will not assemble herself into a crop top and mini skirt to stop at the post office or pick up groceries or even to seduce her significant other. It’s far more subtle and subversive, implicit than that.
There’s a feeling of revolutionary about embracing this part of yourself. Of bringing it forward with the same esteem that you would the desires of otherwise pursuits.
And I think this piece is what intrigues me most — the freedom of something formerly shackled in taboo.
What’s cool about the greater concept of framing trends as reflective of shifting psychic or emotional desires as opposed to material ones is that the impact it has on what you wear is subtler. It’s more about the energetic expression that packs into the clothes, which can be felt most acutely, I think, when the designer of the clothes in question is a woman herself.
Yes, you can look to the sensual tableau constructed by Peter Mulier’s Alaia, an exquisite homage to The Woman, and say: that’s the sexy I want to be. I agree with you to the extent that it is Reverent. He has formulated an actually tender understanding of how I want to feel in my sexuality.
And this is what makes me want to wear the clothes, even though when I have, I’ve also often felt a bit like I’m roleplaying. I don’t always mind it and sometimes I choose it but it’s not me in the thorn of lust and lure, humiliation and heartbreak at 1 p.m. on a walk through midtown or as I head out for lunch or even change a diaper or, I don’t know, pick up a carton of milk.
Because the thing is, a woman’s sexuality knocks into the fore during even the least sexy, most mundane moments. And it takes a woman to know that her sexuality is always there. Before death, after taxes, during a routine dental check-up.
This is true no matter how clever she’s become about tucking it away. About convincing herself and the worlds around her that it comes and leaves, that it’s not part of her with the same permissible constancy that being something else — an almighty working woman, a nurturing caregiver, an esoteric aesthete — may be.
But to shut down the sexuality of a woman’s expression is to cut her off from the most acute articulation of her own life force, from her most creative sense of self.
Chemena Kamali’s Chloe comes to mind as a brand pushing an appealing feminine sexuality into the mundane corners of our lives. So does my friend Yael’s new brand, Aflalo, or Maryam Nassir Zadeh, who has been blending her one-of-a-kind, almost spiritual sense of style with an inherent femininity that is also mature for years.
I think about early Prada or Jil Sander and the clothes they made when they were in their 40s, a time of revolution in a woman’s life, when she has the vibrancy of her youth and the wisdom and confidence of enough life experience to have come into complete and utter self-possession.
Maybe this is actually what I am drawn to — why Phoebe’s Celine was so good: it represented the radical acceptance and embrace that comes to a woman as she evolves into the early days of life’s second half.
In the height of Philo’s career at Celine, Whitney Vargas for T Magazine called what she gave to a woman the grace of invisibility. Because she was busy and she worked and she didn’t have time to fuss but she needed to feel (and wanted to look) damn good. That was her power back then. It still is her power now.
But I have so much hope as we enter a new era, as we crave different kinds of clothes to reflect a deeper understanding of our own multiplicity, that we know our power is varied. That we can have it all. That we are different from the male counterparts we spent decades comparing ourselves to and competing against and trying to best out.
The current fight of womanhood as I see it is to be seen and to be felt, foremostly by ourselves, but also by those closest to us, in the true and full expression of our multiplicities. Within the ferocity and the fight and the vigor we’ve shown, within the softness and the seduction and flirtation, the feminine urges that possess us too.
This is an incredible read. Beyond relevant, intelligent and thought provoking. One of the best things we can all do is let the sexy out and bring our femininity to the forefront unapologetically ♥️
Great read and timely. Being a woman of a certain age, I was feeling a need to wear my accessories I had put away for a calmer minimalist vibe. But lately, something more is speaking to me, and I said to hell with it, I am going full maximize if I feel like it.