Style Points is a column about how fashion intersects with the wider world.
Ever since fashion’s online audience grew to outstrip its offline one, designers have been crafting collections with our feeds in mind. Virality and good old-fashioned shock value became ways to claw into our consciousness, cutting through the morass of SEO results and doom-heavy headlines.
And mere images alone don’t do it for us anymore. Designers have increasingly ginned up videogenic moments—whether it be a living, “breathing” runway or a musical performance—that will cut through the noise and stop us in our tracks, if only for a few moments.
And while haute couture has long been a quieter realm, aimed at a hyper-specific audience and laser-focused on craft, it’s lately been entering that fray. (After all, we all live under the same attention economy.) Daniel Roseberry, a true heir to the Elsa Schiaparelli school of all things shocking, has become a master of this art, creating conversation starters on and off the runway. This season, his Schiaparelli front row hosted Cardi B accessorizing with an actual raven (Poe would have a field day), and the collection included a gown with an anatomically correct heart that actually “beat,” inspired by a Salvador Dalí piece. Roseberry’s Instagram post of the piece drew almost 6 million views in one day.
Then there was Iris van Herpen, perhaps couture’s biggest wild card. Her collections have been inspired by everything from the mushroom network known as the “wood wide web” to the unique properties of magnets. “Sympoiesis,” meaning the interconnectedness of complex systems, was the title of her latest couture collection, and it looked at the links between the ocean, atmosphere, and the climate. Working with biodesigner Chris Bellamy, van Herpen transformed living bioluminescent algae into a glowing gown that quickly became the most talked-about look of the collection. And it broke through far outside the fashion bubble; even Nature magazine covered the news. Like Roseberry’s tell-tale heart, it straddled the line between the living and the mechanical, a contradiction that seemed to be a throughline of the week. (Perhaps being immersed in AI has made us all the more hungry for the real.)
While Roseberry and van Herpen stuck to the realm of the living, Glenn Martens decided to explore a different aspect of life: decomposition. His first foray for Maison Margiela marked one of the most anticipated designer debuts in a season packed with them. Against a backdrop of beautiful, deliberate decay, he delivered on every front, with bejeweled full-face masks and a crushed-candy-wrapper confection of a gown. Martens has shown that he knows how to create a spectacle, and with this collection, he outdid himself, drawing plaudits for the way he deftly incorporated so many Margiela signatures. For the Easter egg collectors, detailed show notes even broke down the references in each and every look.
Robert Wun titled his collection “Becoming,” and he looked at the way we transform ourselves every morning when getting dressed. It was a fairly simple starting point, but it was what he did with it that mattered. Few of us will don the giant hats and angular gowns that Wun put on his runway. But his tribute to the theatrical possibilities of style, down to a dress covered with bloody handprints and a fembot-shaped handbag, was a reminder that there’s plenty of life left in this age-old medium.
