Every autumn, just as the air thins out and subway cars fill up with kids heading back to school, Fashion Week comes rolling into New York like the cool aunt back from a summer holiday with unexpected gifts no one knew they needed or wanted until then.
The streets fill up with black cars bringing the in-crowd inside the shows while a parade of fashionistas outside also don their best to try and catch the eye of photographers, with the New Yorkers hurrying to and fro providing the backdrop. Outfits range from elegant to outrageous, mixing personal expression and conspicuous consumption while giving show attendees and sidewalk-scene attendees alike chances to participate in the frivolity and fun.
“Frivolous” is a funny word. Derived from the Latin word meaning “break, rub or crumble,” Oxford Languages defines it as “not having any serious purpose or value,” and offers a usage example: “The frivolous, fun-loving flappers of the twenties.”
Of course, cultural phenomena mostly involving women (especially young women) are often derided as silly or unnecessary. But the frivolity of fashion underpins a multi-billion-dollar industry, and there’s a history of fashion’s indulgences driving social change and serving as bellwethers of a culture moving in new directions.
Back in the 1850s, rabble-rousers Amelia Bloomer and Susan B. Anthony shook up polite society with their new fashion: the Bloomer costume. Consisting of a shortened and divided skirt — the precursor to women’s pants — it was a widely ridiculed fashion choice that cartoons of the time depicted as immoral, vulgar and downright ugly. The problem, of course, was less about its perceived ugliness and more about what it implied: more freedom and mobility for women.
Fast forward to the early 20th century and fashion was again shaking things up. Besides the scandalous corset-free and knee-baring dresses, the fashions of the flapper were complimented by fashionable new ways to think and behave. Again, polite society was not pleased with these frivolous young women eschewing traditional gender roles by driving cars, staying out late in clubs, drinking, smoking and dancing.
By the 1950s, Dior had unveiled his “new look,” which despite that name was much more of a return to the silhouette of the Victorian era’s cinched-in waists and full skirts, manifesting the collective post-war desire to forget the rationing of the war years and return to a more idyllic time. Women exited the workforce and returned to the domesticity of the pre-war era, and matched their outfits to this cultural shift.
While artistic movements of the time like abstract expressionism and other material décor like furniture made a hard shift into modernism, women’s fashion — made from extravagant amounts of fabric — was a live-action display of the cultural desire to return to a more traditional value system.
But like everything else in life, that didn’t last. By the 1960s the “YouthQuake” — as coined by Diana Vreeland, immortalized by “it-girl” Edie Sedgwick, and made iconic by Mary Quant’s miniskirt — had pulled fashion and society back into the fast forward momentum of modernity.
Again, these new clothes complimented and solidified a societal shift that was youth driven, and a new set of moral codes that rejected traditional gender-roles and prioritized personal freedom — not coincidentally as contraception pills become much more accessible.
Fashion can be fun and yes it can be frivolous, but it is always telling a story and exposing some truth. Whether you think you are participating in fashion or not is irrelevant because everyone is, even if (possibly especially if) you adamantly try not to.
Meryl Streep’s Miranda in “The Devil Wears Prada” gave a now famous monologue on cerulean blue that cements this concept: you are always participating in fashion, whether you like it or not.
Like taxes and death, fashion is an inescapable reality, whether you are riding the wave of what’s new, standing firm, walking against it or being pulled under, all of us are in the water just the same.
So as the sartorially savvy descend upon our fair city this week, you are part of it — and might as well indulge in a little frivolous fun knowing you’re participating in an important piece of our cultural fabric.
Shears is a costume designer, fashion and textile historian and journalist who covers fashion and culture.
