At Couture, Control and Chaos—A Reflection on the Spring 2024 Season

January 29, 2024

Whether or not Barbie was snubbed by the Academy is a matter of opinion; her resplendent triumph at the spring 2024 couture shows is indisputable. The waist, whittled by a corset, is back (for men as well as women), as is the constructed silhouette, an inheritance passed down in contemporary Western fashion by Christian Dior and Charles James. And yet it wasn’t quite business as usual—what is these days?

Firework content

Things were a bit off chez Dior where Maria Grazia Chiuri referenced the jutting angles of the house founders’ 1953 Profile collection. At Jean Paul Gaultier by Simone Rocha and at Viktor Rolf, the “support beams” were exposed. Models inhabited their own ivory towers at Schiaparelli, andthe opening looks at Ronald Van Der Kemp evoked both the Bauhaus and Legos.

On the other end of the spectrum, “naked dressing” was somewhat tempered (call it Lady Godiva dressing), which is perhaps explained by the fashion historian James Laver, who observed in 1952 that, “when women wear no corsets they tend to wear very few clothes.” In the place of full-on display were dresses with filigree treatments that revealed the skin below with extreme delicacy. Some of the looks at Armani Privé, for example, were as delicate as spun sugar. Swansdown, or materials that had that effect, also added to the airiness that breezed through some collections. The openwork trend is something that surfaced in the spring ready-to-wear collections; trends in general seem to be trickling up from off-the-rack to custom-made couture clothes.

Colleagues on the ground at the spring 2024 couture collections reported a sense of paring back at the shows. Some designers trimmed their guest lists, others simplified their color palettes (Dior, Viktor Rolf), or the lines of their garments (Fendi, Julie de Libran). Simultaneously there was a gathering of fragments in bricolage designs that conveyed a power-in-numbers or parts-making-a-whole kind of symbolism.

Couture is about mastery of craftsmanship, which is a kind of control. And control is the pressing issue of the time. Control of political parties, of territories, and of bodies. So it was the Ozempic body versus the corseted/fecund silhouette (Barbie versus Mae West); the coexistence of the no-pants brief and the padded hip. Will tiny waists, and waist-to-hip ratios once again be associated with women’s worth? Back to Laver, who wrote: “it is in times of social upheaval that women gain some degree of emancipation. And they always celebrate their emancipation by cutting off their hair and throwing their bonnets over the windmills—and their corsets after them.”

This is not that moment. In fact history seems to have been foreshortened, so that curvy Kiki de Montparnasse and New Look femme fatales could coexist in John Galliano’s louche collection for Maison Margiela Artisanal, Similarly, AZ Factory guest designer Jenny Hytönen is making new things from old. “When people think about the future, I think the picture is very bland and minimalist,” she told Vogue. “To me, the future is more about layering [things together] and showing the past in a way that windows can open.” A bricolage of thought and materials, what an interesting way to think of continuity and progress. Context is all.