Critics paint the European Union as an overbearing nanny but the continent’s annual couture parades suggest that Brussels’ Mary Poppins still has its work cut out to correct cheekiness in the fashion industry.
The EU has pulled off a remarkable feat in getting sign-up from some major clothing retailers, including the enormous Zara stable, to embrace its new rules aimed at normalising reselling, recycling and mending to reduce fashion’s horrific carbon footprint.
Yet the recent annual couture shows in Paris, Milan and London have produced collections so un-green the models may as well have been borne along the catwalk atop kerbside wheelie bins. Few collections have said “landfill-ho!” more exuberantly than this year’s. Not only have they swept aside popular trends barely seasons old, but the new message is, go absolutely huge or go home. Not since Christian Dior’s post-war New Look, with its ration-defying yardage for three-dimensional skirts, have bolts of fabric been stripped as if by locust plagues with such gay abandon.
High street retailers have been browbeaten into issuing auditable sustainability disclosures and using only ethical (and costly) fabric sources, while also accepting responsibility for an own-throat-cutting secondhand market for the clothes they’ve already sold. But here are the big-name designers who dictate future products taking a last-gasp-of-Pompeii approach with optimal decadence.
Several years’ worth of popular midi fashions – billowy “prairie” frocks and flouncy floral tea dresses – have been declared outré. Instead, it’s back to 1980s excess, the one fashion era comeback for which no bookmaker would have bothered assessing odds, until now. Hulking great shoulder-padded blazers have been powering down the runway like armoured tanks. These are not just generous “boyfriend” jackets, but constructions that, given the height of your average model, make you suspect two or three naughty little kids are standing on one another’s shoulders disguised in their hefty old uncle’s best suit.
If the jacket’s shoulders aren’t extending over the wearer’s by a factor of at least 50%, it marks a shameful lack of commitment.
Under that vast jacket scape goes the dreaded 80s body suit, in all its perma-wedgie torture. For the uninitiated, this garment was, for a time, the mooted solution to tops and blouses that annoyingly rode up past waist bands. It went all the way down one’s trunk and fastened between the thighs, giving a sleek, tucked-in look.
Trouble was, to avoid bagginess, body suits were fitted with very little give. Imagine wearing thong undies while an invisible pixie maliciously tugs the back of them up all day long. As for unfastening them for loo breaks … best not revisit those logistics.
Millennials and Gen Zers have decisively won the war against Mum and Nana’s skinny jeans. Never mind whether your bum looks big in the new pants, these ample strides provide room for what your aforementioned uncle used to call “several axe handles across the beam” without anything touching the sides.
Ideally, the hems pool on the floor, again suggesting those naughty kids playing dress-up. There are “barrel” jeans – high waisted, ankle-tapered and glorying in the silhouette of a pair of courgettes harvested insufficiently quickly.
Also, “horseshoe” jeans – skilfully cut for a rickets effect, bowing as though one’s spent rather too much time on one’s hoss and urgently need a narrower saddle.
Bulky cargo pants are back. Because, of course, we’ve all so missed being able to stash all our stuff in deep pleated pockets all down our legs.
At least under the EU ethos, each of these mega-garments can be repurposed into three new garments when the 80s look is again outré.
Body suits, though … unless Ukraine resorts to catapults, it’ll be a short hop from wedgie to landfill.
