Does Fashion Know What Women Want?

Fashion as expressed on the runway has always been about a delicate balance between fantasy and function. Paris remains the highest stage where this tension becomes harmony, but this past week, that balance faltered, leaning far into spectacle and eclipsing wearability.

At the conclusion of the week, one major complaint surfaced again and again, particularly among female critics: that some collections felt disconnected from how women actually dress.

Pieter Mulier for Alaïa presented a dress that doesn’t have sleeves, essentially functioning like a straitjacket, while models’ mouths were forced open with a metal device at Glenn Martens’s Maison Margiela. Duran Lantik’s raunchy take on Jean Paul Gaultier featured bodysuits printed with a man’s naked body. The minimal body diversity across the runways added insult to injury.

As Vanessa Friedman wrote in a The New York Times piece published Friday, the aesthetic mélange that emerged from Paris Fashion Week this season “introduced clothes that hid, confined, muzzled or even erased the women beneath.”

It echoed a review from The Financial Times’ Elizabeth Paton earlier this week. “[A]mid the sea this season of hot pants and micro minis, the most radical thing many designers could have done would have been to show a pair of full-coverage trousers,” she wrote in a piece with the headline “Do Paris fashion designers want to dress real women?”

Over-the-top runway looks are usually watered down by the time they hit stores, if they are produced for sale at all. But even if Alaïa never sells a single armless dress, the garment and other stunts from the past month have reignited the discourse of how the people who create fashion — mostly men, at the highest levels at least — really feel about their mostly female customers.

The world is primed to label the institution of fashion as sexist. With just a few exceptions, the industry’s biggest companies are led by men, and there’s a long-documented “pink tax” that sees female customers paying more for everything from underwear to sweaters. Of the dozen or so new creative directors named at major brands in the past year, only two were women: Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta and Sarah Burton at Givenchy. So when there are objectionable looks on the runway, whether or not intentionally sexist, it’s not exactly a leap to start pointing fingers.

Of course, the canon of fashion is full of spectacular and absurdly unpractical moments, runway shows that veer into spectacle with abandon — Hussein Chalayan’s video dresses, Rei Kawakubo’s entire archive and McQueen’s No. 13 finale — delivering not only a dream but also expanding the vocabulary of what fashion could express. But though spectacle still has its place, when and how to deploy it requires a different set of calculations as the industry continues to struggle with lagging sales. Fantasy can only go so far for the female customers who need the clothes they buy to work in their everyday lives. There’s a reason that female-led brands with a reputation for creating versatile, wearable pieces — like The Row, Khaite and Kallmeyer — are winning praise right now.

Sometimes in pursuit of creating a dream for the runway, brands lose sight of the very consumer they’re trying to reach. In today’s fragmented media landscape, cultural relevance vis-à-vis creative novelty does not always correlate with — and in fact, often diverges from — commercial success. As runway shows have become a marketing exercise above all else, meant to get people to stop scrolling on social media, designers responsible for a huge volume of collections are forced to endlessly iterate, which can push them further into the avant garde, or downright bizarre, in order to keep things feeling fresh. The pressure is even more pronounced for a designer taking over a house, like Martens and Lantik, with an edict to build their vision for their respective brands.

It’s a tricky balance. Those iterations can’t come at the expense of creating a product that appeals to women. But if you lose too much of the fantasy, the pendulum of public opinion will swing in the opposite direction. Sabato De Sarno’s Gucci is a worst-case scenario, while Virginie Viard and Maria Grazia Chiuri demonstrated that wearability, even at the expense of critical acclaim, is a major sales growth generator. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that both Chiuri and Viard were widely panned as “boring,” a critique that many saw as rooted in sexism and one that ultimately contributed to their exits.

But the bright spots remain. Debuts at Chanel (Matthieu Blazy) and Loewe (Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez) communicated fresh brand narratives while still showcasing pieces and styling that women could imagine wearing in day-to-day life; the same goes for Sarah Burton’s second outing for Givenchy, with full tulle skirts and mini dresses done in lace.

Striking the balance is not just about avoiding the internet’s ire, but simply good business. After all, a fashion brand’s fate rests in its ability to convince women to click purchase.