Sweatpants forever! Depending on where you stand, that motto has become the rallying cry of work-from-home or something to rail against.
Zoom allows for connectivity but it doesn’t even begin to replicate the social aspect of fashion. We are no longer dressing to be seen by others, but for ourselves. In this scenario, touch often trumps sight as we prioritize comfort and actual material flexibility of the kind that is often associated with athletic gear. We need clothes that mold to the body or coddle it rather than create a structure around it. Our clothes today have to work, and in many cases they’ve gone soft in order to do so.
In pop-culture parlance “going soft” means losing one’s edge, as in cool. (LCD Soundsystem wrote a catchy song on this subject). But in fashion, which has a binary structure, it can broadly be understood as a movement away from (masculine) tailoring and toward (feminine) flou; clothing as exoskeleton versus (in some, but not all cases) as second skin. Fashion revels in contradiction, and history suggests that women are often most liberated in periods when clothes work with the body rather than create armor for it.
The 1940s and 1980s are examples of times when there was great upheaval, especially in terms of women’s relationship to work, and as they entered what was largely uncharted territory many borrowed from men’s playbooks, adopting tailored silhouettes with an inverted triangle silhouette that placed emphasis on the shoulders, where burdens come to rest. This type of dressing showed, or projected, strength, through a sort of augmented material presence in which taking up space is equated with power.
In contrast, the softer, more body-conscious fashions of the 1930s and 1970s often clung to and revealed the female body as a source of power. Comfort in dress is defined differently in different eras, but movement and freedom are generally synonymous in fashion. Moreover, they are the qualities that put American fashion on the map. “Since its emergence, American sportswear has been all about accommodating an active lifestyle,” explains Mellissa Huber, assistant curator at the Met’s Costume Institute. “The American woman was historically seen as independent, athletic, engaged. The clothing designed for her reflected values of movement and modernity compared to what came before, and—particularly in juxtaposition with French haute couture—may have stood out for its simplicity. Ultimately it was about achieving a balance between aesthetics and function.”
Making clothes “work” requires innovations that address flexibility and elasticity. In the 1930s, Madeleine Vionnet cut fabric on the bias, where it has the most give, when designing silken slips for the goddesses of cafe society. Norma Kamali explained in a recent Zoom that she had to use girdle fabric to achieve the close-to-the-body effect she was after in her ready-to-wear designs until the late 1970s when fabrics with built-in elasticity became more widespread. Knits have a natural “pull,” and were extensively used in the Me Decade by designers like Halston, Stephen Burrows, Diane von Furstenberg, Sonia Rykiel, and Karl Lagerfeld at Chloé.
Cling, Huber reminds us, is but one aspect of soft dressing: “Soft doesn’t always translate to revealing or form fitting,” she says. “Another return to the body is through revelation, with the fashion for cropped and fitted garments that expose skin and cling to the figure. This formal emphasis on the figure beneath could be seen as a response to the pandemic in some ways, an investment in health with a reinvigorated focus on the body.” We can see this playing out in the spring 2021 collections of Brandon Maxwell, Proenza Schouler, Kim Shui, or even Skims.
Activewear might be described as a distant cousin of body-con dressing, with the added value of performance, be that wicking, temperature adjustment, or pliability. Then there is athleisure, a hybrid of ready-to-wear and activewear, and the passion of many hypebeasts. Not since Norma Kamali worked sweats material into ready-to-wear has it been as tempting to dress down for the “office” and for play. That collection put the casual in casual sportswear. “It started this feeling about being relaxed in your clothes, [the idea] that you could feel comfortable and relaxed and still look great,” Kamali has said.
How we dress can indeed have an impact on how we feel, which might explain the long-term appeal of this kind of dressing. Huber discusses the importance of the mind-body connection. “In one sense, a move away from tailoring towards unstructured, soft clothing is a form of liberation and ease for the wearer, a return to prioritizing the comfort of the body and also perhaps, mobilizing it,” she says. “From a psychological standpoint, this type of ‘soft’ clothing might provide reassurance or solace, and conversely empowerment and freedom.”
What does the tendency toward softness reveal about the collective mindset? Perhaps that we are ready for action and engaged in the present. Soft dressing’s focus on the body keeps fashion grounded, or at least with one foot in reality, which is where we need to be to build back better, comfortably.
