Big Hips, Big Shoulders, Big Feminine Energy

Enter the era of the power curve with Alaïa, Schiaparelli and Chloé.

Wow, that’s one way to hip check someone, I thought, when the first look of the Alaïa show appeared.

The designer Pieter Mulier had dropped the waistbands of his skirts below the belly button and then added a sort of inflatable doughnut inside, so the result resembled a cross between a futuristic pannier and a hula skirt, swaying back and forth with each step. It was both mesmerizing and startling. And, it transpired, a sign of what was to come.

This is turning into the season of the power curve: giant, rounded shoulders; enormous, overblown ruffles; hips that stick out far beyond their natural width; even collars that arch generously up and out. Any distortion of the silhouette, in other words, that creates a sort of in-your-face hourglass and is an answer to the overblown “masculine energy,” as Mark Zuckerberg called it, that has been emerging in the world beyond the runways. The alternative movement, because that’s how it has started to seem, began in Milan at Prada, with Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ embrace of the unflattering, and it is only picking up steam.

If the 1980s gave us the linebacker shoulder, made to break the glass ceiling (or at least try to), this redefines that idea for a new era; softening the edges, embracing the cliché of female curves and recasting it as a challenge. Rather than masculinizing the female body, it supersizes it and makes it undeniable; transforms it into an instrument for occupying space.

“It’s blown up, it’s magnified, it’s taken to the extreme,” summed up Chemena Kamali at Chloé in a preview. In her chiffon and lace shirting, via frills and frippery and the occasional lace peplum, the result took what could have read as fragility and turned it into assertiveness. That’s a sort of fashion alchemy that is hard to resist (and more convincing, anyway, than the free-floating nightie dresses she also favors).