Chatting Up Friends (and Foes) at Fall 2023 Fashion Week

What community-driven designers, corporate honchos, and cool kids were talking about at Fashion Week in New York, London, Milan, and Paris.

On the last day of Paris Fashion Week, the Palais Galliera opened a new exhibition declaring 1997 fashion’s best year. Because of labor strikes, I wasn’t able to see , but Elizabeth Paton at the New York Times and Amy Verner at Vogue covered it extensively, tracking exactly why 1997 was one of fashion’s most pivotal years. It was then that John Galliano ascended to his post as Chrisitian Dior’s creative director, that Rei Kawakubo lumped and bumped gingham dresses, that Gianni Versace was murdered on the steps of his Miami mansion. Fashion expanded and evolved in a way that hadn’t been seen since the interwar period, when Monsieur Dior designed the “New Look,” and Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel battled over women’s dress.

The irony of such a sweeping exhibition opening at the end of the Fall/Winter 2023 season is that the consensus among the editors, buyers, models, and even the designers was that FW23 might just be the “worst season ever,” as some friends began calling it.Listen, it’s not just that fashion people love to be sour. Across the runways in New York, London, Milan, and Paris, it felt like fashion had lost its verve. North Stars of the pre-pandemic era—Virgil Abloh at Off-White and Louis Vuitton, Alessandro Michele at Gucci, and Demna at Balenciaga—died, quit, and became embroiled in a QAnon-fueled scandal, respectively. The tricks of the late 2010s—wowza celebrity guests, awe-inspiring sets, the viral stunts—have grown stale. In the audience, a gulf appeared between the young generation of internet commentators and the old guard of well-respected critics—and a couple feuds erupted as a result.But let’s look on the bright side. Designers like Bottega Veneta’s Matthieu Blazy, Thom Browne, Simone Rocha, Rick Owens, Eckhaus Latta’s Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, Prada’s Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada, Erdem Moralıoğlu, Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, and Kiko Kostadinov’s Laura and Deanna Fanning continued to refine their own languages of style that stood apart from the masses. Maybe that’s where fashion will go next. At the end of the menswear season my colleague Thom Bettridge wrote of the hypernichification of fashion —a refusal of a uniform goal for the rarefied pleasures of cult-like followings.Just look at the Comme des Garçons stable of designers as proof: On March 4, the trifecta of the CDG, Junya Watanabe, and Noir Kei Ninomiya shows caused one editor to proclaim, “My faith in fashion is restored.”Amen, kids.

Fashion is a mirror of our times, and as society continues to trend towards extremism in all forms so will the industry. The stark opposition between emerging talents and established, conglomerate-backed designers, between the new gen and the old guard, and those who do it for love versus those who do it for money has never felt more stark than at the FW23 shows. You could go to a show in a friend’s wine bar, where Talia Byre held her friends-and-family show, or enter a stadium-sized venue for the Super Bowl with any LVMH or Kering-backed brand.Even clothing has gotten more extreme, with a glaring focus on “wardrobe dressing”—a nice way of saying inoffensive tailoring—or wildly experimental silhouettes. What happened to the middle? The pressure to be either financially successful or virally compelling has eradicated a lot of interesting, beautiful, quasi-normal clothes. Still, some persevere: Simone Rocha, Kiko Kostadinov, KNWLS, and even Rick Owens are good examples of harmonizing the creative and the commercial big ideas and our small realities. As Rachel Tashjian wrote in _Harper’s Bazaar of the Rick Owens show: “When it feels as if the world is sapped of happiness or inspiration, it’s a smart person’s responsibility to continue to say something different—something that’s not just not-joy.”

Backstage at Owens’s show I tried to hand a group of models my phone to take a selfie. “Sorry, we can’t find our hands!” one laughed as they all held out their hands, covered by long sleeves or long gloves. (In Rick’s defense, the gloves do have the pointer finger and thumb cut out for this exact reason.) Fashion is grappling with baggage, turning the act of carrying our stuff into a fashion statement in itself. It was elegant at Dries Van Noten and The Row, where models clutched their coats closed, and clever at Balenciaga, where skirts were hiked up on one side and draped over shoulder bags, and Sacai, where skirts were also hiked up to turn a patch pocket into a purse. The eeriest iteration was, of course, the Boston Dynamics robot that held Lila Moss’s bag on the runway—a nice change for the robot, which usually packs heavy artillery.

At the end of Milan Fashion Week, 1Granary’s Aya Noël published a piece called “Why is Fashion Week So Awkward?” Noël illustrates how fashion went from a community-based activity—“My access to the world of fashion was through the dance floor. I didn’t meet John [Galliano] at a job interview, I met him at a party—that is how it worked,” says designer Simon Ungless—to a corporatized world of strangers seated beside each other in the front row, not speaking, swarmed by Slack messages and iPhone notifications. (An interview in i-D between Raf Simons, Pieter Mulier, and Matthieu Blazy by Osman Ahmed notes the way fashion has changed from a communal activity—“We were living together [in the studio] and then Matthieu, when you joined, we’d go out together in the evenings. We would have dinner together in the office very often,” remembers Mulier—to a chilly business affair.) So instead of kvetch, I made it my mission to talk to every person seated beside me, go out to every party, and bring a little life back into this whole thing! Above, you’ll find the publishable tidbits I learned from chatting up friends and strangers. It’s also why I am shouting at all my peers in this article: Fashion is yet an industry run by robots, so why don’t you get to know the people who make it happen?

Black tailoring was far and away the biggest trend of the season. It’s commercially viable and unimpeachable from a style perspective. The good news about all this tailoring is that it gives shoppers plenty of options to freak their suit style. Where do you fall on the matrix?

Culinary items like plates, forks, and spoons made their catwalk debuts thanks to S.S.Daley, Dilara Fındıkoğlu, and HODAKOVA. All the more reason to dress like your dining room table—just add a Puppets and Puppets cookie bag or an Area banana.

By the time London Fashion Week ended, fashion had had its way with animals. Collina Strada made lizard face masks and Christopher Kane used AI to create a print of little chicks and rats. In Milan, things took a turn for the mystical, with mermaids inspiring Blazy at Bottega Veneta and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist works on gowns at Paco Rabanne. The forest of fashion is rife with fauna and fairies—find your place in the venn diagram.

It only took five days of New York Fashion Week for the gender imbalance on the runways to come into glaring relief. A female model opened a show in a completely sheer catsuit and stiletto heels while the menswear looks were oversized and completely covered up. Hmm. It continued in Europe, where the numbers of exposed breasts outdid any other forms of nudity. So here’s my request: For every boob I see, I’d also like to see a dick. Don’t tell me that’s unfair. The Motion Picture Association of America sees breasts and penises as equal, both acceptable in R-rated films. So far, Rick Owens is the rare designer to show shaft with his Fall 2015 menswear collection, but others came close. Dion Lee showed models of all genders in sheer garments, as did Glenn Martens at Y/Project, while Jonathan Anderson had penis art by Michael Clark at his JW Anderson show and Martens handed out condoms at Diesel in Milan.

Rather than issue an expansive verdict on the season, we at SSENSE want to welcome you to our world of hypernichification and identify some of our favorite micro trends. Have you met Alex Consani yet? Are you down with dorkiness? Familiarize yourself with the ideas that stood out this season and tell us your favorites, too.