It's difficult to discuss femininity and fashion and not address the conversations taking place - those about power politics and #MeToo. Conversations about gender and about complicity and nuance.
Complicity isn't just about sustaining a culture of silence amid abuse. Perpetuating a particular view of femininity has a part to play. How do we teach ourselves as women not to conflate softness and compliance, or see it as mutually exclusive with strength?
It might be naive to think a runway collection can stamp on feminine cliches. But it's also naive to think it can't. Especially when the collection positing that the two can co-exist is that of a luxury powerhouse: Alexander McQueen, a brand belonging to a conglomerate worth over $33.7 billion, with over 5 million followers on Instagram.
Creative director, Sarah Burton, is one of a number of female designers doing away with such black and white thinking.
Burton, like Phoebe Philo at Celine, often pairs supposed opposites (remember the lazy luxury of those mink-lined sandals, and what we thought of Birkenstocks before Philo put them on the runway).
It may seem pertinent now, while we collectively re-evaluate what it means to be feminine, but 'the force of femininity,' as Burton put it backstage at the AW18 show, 'is what McQueen has always been about.'
McQueen was a master of mixing the immiscible, with contradictory adjectives and ideas often bandied in the same sentence: louche luxury (crack on show in premium crafted bumsters); nature transposed into otherworldly digital prints; Savage Beauty. With Burton, the oppositions are still there with raw-cut leather and BDSM-tight belting, with pimpernel pink satin pooling at the feet. It's there with bone and eau de nil tulle styled with bovver boots.
You'll like the zip-fronted lacquered footwear.
Burton said she was thinking of butterflies and beetles: 'metamorphosis and hybrids, the morphing of one creature, one garment into another.' Black tufting and duchess drapery can coexist comfortably, rather than contradict each other. In the same way that Burton, a gentile blonde in blue denim and chambray, can reel off romantic references before explaining, 'and actually, I just thought 'f**k it.''
She spoke of a suited, 'sensual and powerful muse' in a 'hyper-real world, where joy and optimism prevail.' A utopia where softness is strength, not a paradoxical counterpart. But women are talking - now more than ever, saying 'hey, those 'contradictory' qualities... you don't have to pick one.' 2018 is for a 'f**k you' femininity where bold is beautiful. So we'll counter 'utopia,' an imagined state. Because what Burton's McQueen reflects is very much reality.
