Boxing topped Yuhan Wang’s bill as the heavyweight sporting inspiration for this show. Her press release spelled out pioneering female fighters including Jane Couch, Laila Ali (daughter of Muhammad), and Bridgett Riley as personifications of the spirit she was attempting to distill in her clothes. As the designer put it: “I think the past sportswear was all based on men. It’s quite functional, but no one’s thinking about how women want to be dressed in that kind of sportswear. Since we are quite good at lace, romantic moods, we are trying to express sportswear in a more feminine way.”
This was further laid out via the head guard and silk boxing gloves clad in lace, and to a lesser extent the layered-waistband boxer shirts in shirting cottons. The notion of bringing ultrafeminine tropes into a sporting arena that until not so long ago was formally forbidden to women was a clever way of generating an interesting tension for Wang to explore.
However, that headline sporting reference proved only one in a whirlwind combination of them. Football shoulder pads, basketball jerseys, soccer shin pads, tennis sweatbands, baseball shirts, and court shoe-sneaker hybrids were also thrown into the mix. Then there were the full tiered skirts, sometimes panniered, that were a tribute to a group of female wrestlers from La Paz, Bolivia, named the Fighting Cholitas. En masse these served to dilute the impact of the dichotomy that Wang had initially set up so nicely. Still, it was fun to sit runway ringside and follow Wang’s bout between the gendered codes of recreational protection and provocation.
