For much of 2023, I’ve been thinking about something Miuccia Prada said in February, ahead of the Prada fall collection. “Reality is rich. Real life is much more rich than any fantasy. And therefore more important.” She was referring to the way she and Raf Simons looked for inspiration to both nurses’ uniforms and wedding dresses—garments that sit on opposite ends of an aesthetic spectrum yet are essential parts of people’s lives—but her words resonated well beyond those looks: Reality is rich. Real life is much more rich than fantasy.
My reality, nay, our reality this year was rich in a specific feeling: that of unhingedness. In 2023, I noticed myself using the word to describe an ever-increasing number of things: people, politics, cultural moments, and, of course, fashion. We are living in an unhinged era (The New Yorker agrees) and although the word is often used to signify something that is not good, I’ve come to reclaim it and embrace it for its positive potential. Unhinged as in completely given in to creative impulses; a resolute belief in one’s ideas and aesthetic proposals, while also not taking oneself too seriously. A commitment to unbridled emotion.
Looking back at this year’s collections, many designers seemed to be on this same unconstrained wavelength. It was there in Prada’s fall 2023 collection, with its pillow-like cropped jacket and matching pencil skirt, and in the spring 2024 collection in a pair of acid yellow square-toed satin mules with the tiniest rectangular kitten heels jutting out at strange angles (and it was definitely there in the green slime that elegantly oozed from the ceiling of the show venue, while the models walked in chiffon dresses that floated like they came with their own built-in wind machines). Collina Strada’s Hillary Taymour put models in animal prosthetics, along with straightforward slouchy satin suits and terrific coats.
But it’s not just about slime or dolphin noses. Just look at Bottega Veneta’s Matthieu Blazy: In the span of a year he queered the concept of quiet luxury with button-down shirts, flannels, jeans, and even boxer shorts and knitted socks by making them out of leather, and delivered a collection whose sensory overload—open weave raffia knitted dresses bursting with giant pom poms, skirts with topographical textures and seams—that signaled an emotionally raw state of mind.
Studies show that humans are processing more information than ever before in human history—about 74GB, or the equivalent of 16 movies per day, every day, which is an absolutely unhinged fact. Below, scroll through to see all the ways that the runways reflected a similar kind of unhinged and beautifully chaotic energy.
