It’s a Man’s World. So How Should a Woman Dress in It? It’s a Man’s World. So How Should a Woman Dress in It?

Fashion wrestles with a shift in gender politics.

At the finale of the Thom Browne show, the last show of New York Fashion Week, a model appeared in a jacket encrusted with gold bullion, worn atop 130 feet of swathed tweed and many layers of crinolines. The skirt was so elaborate, with so many tiers and drapes, it hindered her movement, as if she were weighed down by all the girlish expectations.

To a certain extent, designers are always wrestling with the tropes of femininity — playing with them, embracing them, subverting them, dosing them with irony — but such choices seem much more freighted in the dawn light of trad wives, Barstool Sports and Hulk Hogan. What it means to dress like a woman in the era of the “manosphere” was the central question of this past New York Fashion Week.

When macho posturing is on the rise, do you lean into ruffles and lace and corsets and hobble skirts? Do you play the fainting flower or the sex kitten? The princess in the tower or the pinup? Or do you do something entirely different?

Do you think, for example, of “the matriarch,” like Rachel Scott, the founder and designer of Diotima? Ms. Scott’s collection was for the multitasker of all multitaskers, running the household and the family and the budget. Over the last few months, Ms. Scott said she felt Black women, but also all women, had been “reduced, really flattened” and denied “nuance, complexity and sensuality.”

So she decided to offer it to them in her signature mix of tailoring and crochet work. Giant fringy knit lapels burst forth from suit jackets, which covered openwork tunics or tanks of crystal mesh, and suit trousers were swapped for silk bloomers.