THE SHOW that generated the most smiles this past New York fashion week may well have been that of Japanese designer Tomo Koizumi, whose huge puffball clothes in Easter-egg colors kicked off the season. Their hyper-proportions were in keeping with an overall trend toward bigness: On the recent runways of designers like Valentino and the Row, proportions swelled to the size of small sailing ships. At Marc Jacobs and Chanel, the models were enveloped in copious yardage. Even labels known for a body-conscious fit included more-generous silhouettes, albeit flirtatiously executed: At Jacquemus, gathered swingy tops obscured as much as they revealed.
The current fad for fullness began with the oversize menswear tailoring that started showing up in the 2000s, spawned by the David Byrne-sized tailoring favored by Phoebe Philo at Céline and Demna Gvasalia and his crew at Vetements, both of whom, I would guess, were influenced by early work by Belgian conceptual designer Martin Margiela. For some designers, however, a looser fit is part of a creative philosophy that’s both aesthetic and moral. When Maria Cornejo, whose sculptural designs have an urbane sophistication that’s due in part to their relaxed relationship with the body, opened her shop in downtown New York in 1998, she said, “I had just had a baby and I wanted to embrace the idea that women come in different shapes and sizes, and that there shouldn’t be an ideal they should strive to be.”
“ ‘Wearing big clothes is assertive, a way of taking up more space.’ ”
Volume in women’s fashion can also be read as denoting power, a concept that designers continue to grapple with. Wearing big clothes is assertive, a way of taking up space. “It’s like, ‘I’m here and don’t mess with me,’” said Hannes Hetta, a Paris-based fashion editor and consultant. “It’s the psychology of the large silhouette.”
While substance has sometimes been on trend—in the 1980s, for example, when gargantuan shoulder pads transformed women into skyscrapers—for the most part, when Western fashion has ballooned to billowy proportions, it has been under the sway of Middle Eastern and Asian dress, which rather than delineating the human body treats it more abstractly. In the early 1900s, couturier Paul Poiret was fascinated by loosely cut clothing like caftans and kimonos. And in the 1980s, fashion was influenced by the arrival in Paris of designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, who adhered to the Japanese tradition of cutting clothes that are loose and oversized. Although these ideas came to be widely adapted, they were at first greeted with suspicion and sometimes outright anger. When Vogue photographed Ms. Kawakubo’s giant T-shirt dress perforated with holes in 1983, an irate reader fired off a letter suggesting that the designer be “shackled with Chanel chain belts and force-fed Audrey Hepburn movies until they gain some taste and appreciation of the female body.”
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It’s impossible to talk about the fit of women’s clothing and not discuss the female body. Given #MeToo and the rise of modest fashion, oversize clothes make sense. To my knowledge, no one is publicly disparaging women’s desire to wear them today. But that 1983 letter, which, judging by the writer’s name (Don), was submitted by a man, made me think of another time that a relaxed fit was fashionable: the chemise dress of 1957-1958, which broke free of the hourglass silhouette introduced by Christian Dior in 1947 by bypassing the waist. At its most extreme, it was shaped like an inverted triangle, with a high, wide neck and a tapered skirt. Less radical versions had slightly fitted waists in front and fell in a straight line at the back. When the chemise first appeared, in August 1957, critics were skeptical. “A dress should conform to the body at all times,” one designer told Women’s Wear Daily. Women, the thinking went, wouldn’t want to buy a dress that was essentially a sack.
But they did. Marilyn Monroe ordered three in one go, prompting WWD to write a story about it, possibly because its editors were amazed that the woman with the most famous body in the world should choose to conceal it.
Those who objected to the chemise were by and large men. A Redbook article at the time described “eager-eyed males…confronted by young women who looked like toothpaste tubes. The view was infuriating.” It’s the word “view” and all the smug ownership that it suggests, that I keep returning to when I read that sentence. That, and the fact that it appeared in a mass circulation magazine aimed at women.
The chemise, incidentally, was a short-lived trend, but it did pave the way for the looser-fitting shift dress of the 1960s. And the clothes of the 1960s, with their comfortable fits and casualness, continue to influence fashion. The va-va-voom silhouettes of the 1950s so yearned for by those eager-eyed males, on the other hand, are just a memory.
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