Is Sex Really Back in Fashion? - Harper's BAZAAR

Miuccia Prada is alarmingly au courant. Her Miu Miu set—variations on a belted, drab pleated skirt chopped off into a daring mini, with a crop top to match—has gone viral, appearing on magazine covers and models and spawning a rash of DIY and knockoff imitations. And Miu Miu in general is one of the most copied brands in existence, especially by ultra-fast-fashion brands like Fashion Nova and Shein, not because it’s easy to knock off (it’s not) but because Mrs. Prada makes clothing that women absolutely want to wear right this instant.

“Screw it, baby,” the set seems to be saying. “Forget these bourgeois expectations—let's go wild.” Even if you don’t want to wear a teeny-tiny skirt, haven’t you felt that way over the past few months, needed that sense of release, felt like you were dreaming constantly of freedom? It’s no grand statement about femininity, but a message about something subconscious that many of us are missing.

And yet, many people seem to take the success of her Miu Miu look as evidence that sex has come back into fashion—that women are ready to reveal themselves again for the public gaze, telegraphing themselves as available and curious (if only spiritually). But the Miu Miu show on Tuesday, basically a prissier continuation of that Spring 2022 show, shows why that’s not at all the case.

“Screw it, baby,” the set seems to be saying. “Forget these bourgeois expectations—let's go wild.”

Nearly every look was a reprisal of the viral mini skirt look, many with coats and shrunken bomber jackets, plus ballet slippers and bunched up ballet thigh highs. In between these spunky women were a handful of men, many of them with long pre-Raphaelite hair and lean Bambi-like limbs, basically in the same looks as the ladies. It felt less like the much-desired relaunch of Miu Miu men’s (which shuttered in 2008) and more like a statement about the fluidity of this attitude, this thirst for liberation.

That spirit, and a sense of excitement and experimentation, is what lies beneath these clothes, I think. There’s nothing come-hither about these women or men, unless they are gazing hungrily at another crazy experience that might make a great story at a dinner party one day. They are eager to grow up, and eager to move on from the present and all its rules and obligations, if only because they think they’ll be or feel young forever. That’s the incredible high I think we’re chasing when we go gaga for that mini skirt set.

The sugar punk girlishness—maybe it’s a sense of naïveté—is carrying Chanel into the future, too. Virginie Viard’s Chanel feels heavier than Karl Lagerfeld’s, but it also feels less like meme fashion. Lagerfeld, of course, was designing way before the invention of the meme, but he presaged it, basically, by turning the signatures of Chanel—tweed, chains, gold buttons, the skirt suit—into globals symbols as instantly recognizable as Coca-Cola and the Mona Lisa. Viard has shimmied the Chanel staples away from all that bigness, and even though the shows still have audiences of thousands of people, Viard gives everything a more quiet feeling.

This struck me particularly because this was her most Lagerfeldian collection yet. The theme was tweed, which is basically like making the theme the brand itself, and the bulk of the looks were skirt suits with jackets of varying volumes and lengths. But her skirt-suited ladies, with their shiny bouncy hair, felt like real girls, rather than avatars for the Lagerfeels. And I think she just understands something Lagerfeld never could, either because he was a man or because he just thought so big: the quirks and strangeness and inner life of a woman, which I saw reflected in funny little details like the layered bags and opaque tights and even the little smiles that many of Viard’s models wore on Tuesday.

To get back to sex, though—there were one other collection, coming from a much more adult perspective, that underscored to me that the new preponderance of revealing or ultra-feminine clothing isn’t really a statement about sex at all. I stopped by the Alaia showroom to see the collection that Pieter Mulier presented back in January during couture week, and I was struck by the appealing sharpness of the fabrics, in addition to the Alaia-worthy clarity of the silhouettes. The clothes, from peacoats to a coated nylon gown, were aggressive and superb, but if they were seducing anyone, it was the wearer. The same goes for Miu Miu: it’s about the wearer, not the audience. They are more about an obsession with composure in a life where nothing can be controlled. You put on your snakeskin coat, or your trumpet hem shirtdress (!!!), or your blue coat whose skirted back can be buttoned together, and you can do anything.

It isn’t that a designer couldn’t make sexy clothing. The one designer I’ve come across in the past year or so who is actually making sexy clothing is Eli Russell Linnetz, whose brand ERL continues to make sportswear pieces that cling to or fall off the body, creating always an image of appealing pouts, desiring sighs, and horny gazes. (Marine Serre, with her voluptuous jerseywear and curvaceous dresses, may also fit the bill.) But these clothes that emphasize or reveal the body, or even that emphasize femininity, aren’t here to plug sex at all. Sex, after all, is about power, and Miu Miu, in particular, is about denying power, or even mocking it.

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