I’m glad you asked that! Just this week, I wore Balenciaga’s $925 wrap skirt to work. You know, the one that’s actually a towel. There’s no trompe l’oeil special effects at play: unlike those Bottega Veneta “jeans” that are, in fact, printed leather, or Schiaparelli’s “sequin” palette dress (they were false nails). This skirt is—I promise you—exactly like the bath towel that you reached for this morning after taking a shower, only it has an unassuming adjustable fastening at the waist, and a Balenciaga label on the inside.
So towel-y is said skirt, that IKEA’s PR team moved quicker than a Black Friday bargain furniture shopper to recreate the look on Instagram using its Vinarn bath towel. As per the homeware behemoth’s website, the Vinarn is “extra soft and super-absorbent. The waffle border gives a quality feel. A perfect match in style and color with VALLASÅN towels.” Although, speaking from experience, one wearable towel per outfit is plenty.
IKEA’s care instructions stipulate that its towels must be machine washed at 60C. You can tumble dry the Vinarn, and iron it at a maximum temperature of 150C, but don’t dry clean, they say.
Over at Balenciaga.com, the terry cotton towel skirt is listed as dry clean only, which might raise a few eyebrows at the counter of your local dry cleaners. It’s also described as “regular fit”, and will, therefore, hug the body like all the other towels you’ve worn...
How does one style a towel for the office? Well, early on a particularly crisp Tuesday morning, I peeled on two pairs of Wolford opaque tights and a polo neck body, added H&M’s knit balaclava, Balenciaga sunglasses, stilettos, and swathed myself in the towel skirt. Fifteen minutes later, on the Elizabeth Line, it looked like I’d locked myself out of the house while doing the bins. Only the bins were across town.
At the office, during a mid-morning cover meeting, it dawned on me that my fit looked like the runway equivalent of the nursery pupil who had to be changed after an accident during storytime. But, here’s the thing: Demna’s talking-point design (for spring 2024 Balenciaga will deliver a series of plush robes) isn’t the only haute bathroom attire to register on the fashion radar this season. During The Row’s Pre Fall show in Paris, the Olsen twins persuaded us that very expensive hotel slippers complement a luxe trench coat, and Phoebe Philo’s A1 Catalogue boasts a black satin wrap dress which looks uncannily like a dressing gown.
It’s also worth remembering (as I reminded myself that Tuesday) Demna is a Maison Margiela acolyte; he cut his teeth at the house’s Paris atelier after graduating from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. The Marcel Duchamp-esque repositioning of a humble bath towel is in the same vein as Maison Margiela’s spring 1990 plastic carrier bag T-shirt, and 1989 broken porcelain waistcoat, both of which are sacred chapters in fashion’s canon. As Marc Jacobs once said: “Anybody who’s aware of what life is in a contemporary world, is influenced by Margiela.”
If the towel skirt is to be read as a comment on our times, my sense is that it hints at a modern human desire to linger in the chrysalis phase of our day—those moments before we are confronted with the news, the emails, the noise. Swaddled in a bath towel, we get to suspend the outside world a while longer. Would I wear it again? Perhaps. There is something rather beautiful in the idea of an outfit that lets you take the most peaceful moments of your day with you…