Menswear makes a switch in silhouette and a return to smartness

Change in fashion generally comes in two guises. The first is superficial, change-lite, suggested via tinkering with surface trimmings. The second is more fundamental: a change initiated via shifts in shape, in the architecture and silhouette of garments, and therefore our perceptions of our bodies.

It’s easier and more common to alter the look of something, but transforming its very make-up is complicated. Yet it’s how real evolution, and even revolution can come about in the clothes we put on. It can change how we look as people and how we look at people. It can also be alarming — shift it too fast and you’ll scare the horses. Hence fashion changes in a way that really matters infrequently — once or twice a decade, at most.

It’s exciting when it does happen. And I sensed a certain significance to the changes in silhouette we saw in the January menswear shows, for autumn/winter 2023. Often, the defining shape of a particular decade will only come into focus a few years in: the truly mini miniskirt really only emerged in the mid-1960s; there was a hangover of 1980s bold-shoulders until at least 1994. It seems the 2020s will be about length, leanness — an elongated, attenuated silhouette for him and, increasingly, for her.

The season belonged to Anthony Vaccarello, who unveiled a standalone Saint Laurent menswear collection for the first time in Paris, consisting of tramline-straight, drop-to-the-floor overcoats tailored with surgical precision. It was the most extreme iteration of notions that bubbled again and again — in Milan, men’s outerwear either took the form of sober and strict overcoats, or the camp high-drama of sweeping capes. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons yanked down the hems of parkas to hobble the shins while, in New York, Willy Chavarria sliced satin into tautly fitted coats so severe they wound up resembling Catholic soutanes.

It’s important because it feels like a big switch from the prevalent shape of the past decade, which has been overwhelmingly oversized, overblown, and now feels a little over. That silhouette’s predominance was triggered almost a decade ago by the designer formerly known as Demna Gvasalia (now, just Demna), who founded the label Vetements, in 2014. He has since left and, since 2015, has headed up Balenciaga, whose economic heft and stylistic influence ensured that the designer’s signatures of intentionally sloppy, slope-shouldered tailoring, baggy dresses and XXL T-shirts have been present at every level of the market.

There were precursors to those, of course — Gvasalia’s work openly references the maxi-sized garments Martin Margiela first showed in 2000, the same year Raf Simons also designed a still-influential collection of gargantuan bomber jackets under his own label. Over the past five years, it seems, clothes have only gotten bigger and bigger. It was inevitable we’d reach saturation point, and shrink it all again.

A seismic shift in silhouette can sometimes happen in an instant. In the summer of 1929, Parisian couturiers — who were then the only fashion leaders that counted — dramatically transformed the women’s silhouette for the autumn/winter season. The flapper look, a tubular shape with dropped waist akin to everything from Art Deco furniture to Modernist skyscrapers, was scrapped. Waists rose to a natural position, high hemlines plummeted. In this instance, fashion was eerily prescient of the end of the decade’s glory days: on October 29, the stock market crashed, signalling the beginning of the Great Depression.

Almost two decades later, in 1947, Christian Dior proposed his “New Look”, a radical reconsideration of femininity that swelled bosoms and hips, expanded skirts and sloped shoulders. Reminiscent of Victorian dress, its message was not merely stylistic, but socio-economic too: the vast expanses of fabric, sometimes more than 40 metres in a single dress, semaphored abundance. A paradox in a time of rationing and curtailment.

The archetypal feminine silhouette reinforced conservative and restrictive notions of women’s roles as wives and mothers following their independence during wartime — Dior wanted his women to resemble flowers, not fighters. It was — much like Vaccarello’s latest Saint Laurent collection — the most extreme iteration of a wider consensus.

What does this change in silhouette say about right now? While the “hemline index theory” has been debunked, hemlines do sometimes slip during times of strife — which consequently sells more fabric. It happened in the economic stagnation of the 1970s, where the midi replaced the mini; the thigh-grazing skirts of the 1980s inched ever lower as the Great Recession and Gulf war progressed. There is also an argument that we move towards more conservative styles in times of difficulty — through the 1930s, women shifted towards traditional notions of femininity after the liberation of the 1920s.

Post-9/11 you saw it as well. Within 18 months, fashion magazines were hurrahing a return to elegance, championing the couture-tinged clothes of designers such as Alber Elbaz (at Lanvin) and Olivier Theyskens (at Rochas), which influenced fashion across the board, sweeping away much of the sexualised body-baring styles of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Skirts once again dropped, while waistbands rose from hip-hugging and thong-baring to slice neatly across a natural waist.

Today, the high fashion shift is not only from oversized to undersized, but away from casual sportswear towards the formal and polished, tailored and pin-neat.

Fashion’s nature is to snap back against styles that have become ubiquitous. So here’s what’s happening in menswear right now — via the look and feel of Vaccarello’s savant of a Saint Laurent show, which tells you all you need to know about the near-future of fashion. The shoulder, although still wide, has been hoicked up, straightened, tightened, properly tailored. The hems of coats are grazing the heels while collars are rising, shirts and turtlenecks holding the chin erect, even arrogantly so, the antithesis of emo navel-gazing. Waistbands are hiked up to elongate legs, trousers cut slightly wider but still lean. Indeed, after almost a decade of dressing like surly teenagers, fashion is growing up. Expensive clothes look expensive again. It’s about time. 

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