Clare Waight Keller, then the hugely successful designer at French house Chloé, to help her select a worthy student to intern with her, and we were both struck by how oversized and shroud-like the designs on display were. “That’s because most of the students are scared to death of women’s bodies,” the tutor sighed.Swipe right to now, and the chickens are well and truly roosting.
It isn’t only women’s bodies that seem to be a messy inconvenience at some shows, but our gender. On the Paris catwalk last week, a show designed by the crème de la crème graduates of L’Institut Français de la Mode (IFM) – a school founded by Yves Saint Laurent, the man who added many an empowering outfit to the female fashion lexicon, chief among them the Le Smoking tuxedo – models were buried beneath vast layers of gender-neutralising clothing.
That’s one way to deal with The Breast Problem. More eerily, the models’ faces were often obliterated behind balaclava-type shrouds.A number of the students involved told voguerunway.com they were exploring body and gender diversity – preoccupations spreading among fashion students in the UK, too.
It’s not just students. Balenciaga, the hugely influential Paris-based brand designed by Demna Gvasalia, an articulate, Georgian-born designer, ignited the trend for obliterating faces and won Kim Kardashian’s approval when she wore a Balenciaga face-smothering body suit to the Met Ball in New York last year.
Read more on telegraph.co.uk