Skip to content
7meel

7meel

The art of Fashion

Primary Menu 7meel

7meel

  • Fashion News
  • Fashion Designer
  • Fashion Illustration
  • Jewerly
  • Outfits
  • Shopping
  • Abous Us
    • Sitemap
    • Contact Us
    • Privacy Policy
    • Advertise Here
  • Home
  • Fall 2022 Saw the Full Force Of the Fashion Resistance
  • Fashion Illustration

Fall 2022 Saw the Full Force Of the Fashion Resistance

Christine A. Oritz July 10, 2022
schiaparelli fall 2022
SCHIAPARELLI

IT WASN’T QUITE THE REUNION the fashion pack had anticipated. February 24, the day Russian troops commenced their assault on Ukraine, was the second day of Milan Fashion Week and the halfway point of a season that represented the biggest return to the traditional, physical runway show format since COVID shut down the world in early 2020.

Planeloads of international buyers, journalists, photographers, celebrities and models had reassembled on the circuit in numbers not seen in two years, over the moon to be back in the business of fabulousness. Then came Putin’s reality check. “My decision not to use any music was taken as a sign of respect towards the people involved in the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine,” tweeted Giorgio Armani, the first designer to respond publicly to the crisis, after dispatching his models down the runway in total silence. Balenciaga wiped its entire Instagram feed, its only social media activity in the lead up to its March 6 show in Paris being a request for people to donate to The World Food Program.

“In a time like this, fashion loses its relevance and its actual right to exist. Fashion week feels like some kind of an absurdity,” read the show notes of Balenciaga creative director Demna Gvasalia, for whom the matter was personal, the conflict having triggered his own memories of fleeing the Georgian civil war in 1993, initially to Ukraine, as a 10-year-old refugee.

After initially considering cancelling the show altogether, he later concluded that that would mean “giving in”. Tweaking his original show concept, which had been intended as a statement on another global crisis — climate change — Gvasalia delivered a dystopian tour de force that was hailed by many as the season’s defining show.

Balenciaga fall 2022
BALENCIAGA

Presented inside a cylindrical glass-walled structure that simulated a giant snow globe, models trudged out through a manufactured snow blizzard in the designer’s trademark oversized streetwear and tailoring, which included a floor- length black coat made from a new mycelium-derived leather-look product called EPHEA. There were stretch dresses and bodysuits, some enveloped in Balenciaga-branded packing tape; supersized, shrunken or partially destroyed turtlenecks, pants and hoodies; and towels worn as wraps. Among the handbags was a new design called The Trash Pouch — the luxury equivalent of a garbage bag. Gvasalia’s mis-en-scène perversely paralleled the humanitarian crisis that was unfolding a few borders over, his models resemblant of refugees carrying their belongings in whatever they could grab as they fled. Oversized T-shirts bearing the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag were placed on every seat and the show closed with a man in a yellow tracksuit and a woman in a blue evening gown with a long train. “This show needs no explanation,” said Gvasalia. “It is a dedication to fearlessness, to resistance, and to the victory of love and peace.”

Call it coincidence — or perhaps yet another illustration of fashion’s much-discussed knack for serving as a cultural barometer — but frissons of fearlessness and feminine empowerment reverberated throughout the fall 2022 collections. Yes, there were nods to the heavy sexual overtones of the spring 2022 season, when collections groaned with cut-outs, micro-miniskirts, bralettes, seductive strapwork ad sleek catsuits, as if designers had been celebrating the world reconnecting after two years of isolation and lockdowns. But winter is coming and with it, they seemed far more preoccupied with serving up a heavy dose of fashion PPE.

This show needs no explanation. It is a dedication to FEARLESSNESS, to RESISTANCE, and to the victory of LOVE and PEACE

Demna Gvasalia

A viral TikTok trend over the northern winter just past, balaclavas were all over the runways, as were myriad different garments featuring attached hoods. Full face coverings also proved a popular runway or lookbook styling tool. The trend did not escape the attention of some Muslims, who face discrimination in a number of countries about wearing the hijab. Supermodel Bella Hadid came under fire on Instagram during the New York leg of the season, after posting images of herself in the Proenza Schouler show wearing a black hooded sweater. She later posted several messages of support for Muslim women.

max mara fall 2022
MAX MARA
tom ford  fall 2022 balaclava
TOM FORD

Balmain’s collection featured so many looks evocative of body armour, tactical gear, compression padding and protective wear, that creative director Olivier Rousteing felt the need to clarify things in his show notes. “These runway offerings were not designed as a direct response to the recent horrific invasion of our neighbours,” said Rousteing.

Shoulder pads, which seem to cycle in and out of fashion on a roughly 40-year rotation, were everywhere. They first found their way into modern womenswear in the 1930s via the couturiers Elsa Schiaparelli and Marcel Rochas. They helped define the womenswear silhouette of the 1940s, a period that witnessed a job surge for women, many of whom donned military uniforms and filled jobs left vacant by men who had gone to fight in World War II. Shoulder pads re-emerged in the so-called Dress for Success 1980s, a decade in which labour force growth was substantially higher for women than for men in every region of the world except Africa, according to United Nations data.

Although women continue to be vastly under-represented in many fields, notably in management roles (and globally earn 37 per cent less than men in similar roles according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021), the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reported that women made up almost half the paid work force in Australia in 2020, up from about 30 per cent in 1966. Female unemployment fell to a 50-year low of 3.8 per cent at the beginning of the pandemic. Call it a coincidence, but shoulder pads returned just as women are leading a post-COVID charge back to the workforce that has driven the Australian unemployment level to a 14-year low of four per cent. Of the 376,500 jobs created since March 2020, ahead of the first COVID lockdowns, women have taken 250,000, or more than two-thirds of these, according to March ABS figures.

VETEMENTS

Exaggerated, mannish shoulders became the linchpin of what has been widely dubbed “the new power suit”: Christian Dior’s gridiron football-like padded epaulettes; Peter Do’s dropped-shoulder blazers that seemed multiple sizes too large; sharp-shouldered looks at Gucci, Prada, Sportmax, Jil Sander, Saint Laurent, Versace and others in everything from blazers and coats to evening dresses and even jumpsuits. Trousers were baggy, often supersized, hems dropped to maxi length and the word “oversized” recurred again and again in designer show notes. For his second collection for Alaïa, Pieter Mulier’s oversized tailoring was inspired, he said, by the voluminous cashmere men’s coats that Azzedine Alaïa had made in the 1970s and 1980s for Hollywood icon Greta Garbo, who was renowned for her androgynous style, favouring trousers, trench coats and flat shoes.

A week after the season wrapped, queer American writer Jill Gutowitz caused a minor media furore after penning a story for Harper’s BAZAAR US claiming that “lesbian fashion” has been widely adopted by straight women. She cited the current preponderance of women in trouser suits on the red carpet, along with the popularity of wide-legged trousers, sweater vests, Doc Martens, loafers, leather trench coats, baggy denim and dungarees. Noted Gutowitz: “Any given straight woman named Sarah feels the freedom to dress like Trinity from The Matrix now, an outfit once reserved for intense queer women.”

Trinity — the kick-ass Matrix hacker-turned-freedom fighter played by Carrie-Anne Moss, who was kitted out in black leather trench coats, PVC bodysuits and leggings — could have been a fall 2022 muse. Leather trench coats and dress coats reigned at brands including Rokh, Saint Laurent, Prada, Marine Serre, Oscar de la Renta, Richard Malone, Raf Simons, Alaïa and Schiaparelli, often in black but also rendered in a rainbow of colours. A plethora of other leather or PVC garments included dungarees at Isabel Marant, Bottega Veneta and Missoni; leather dresses at Loewe, Christopher Kane, Chloé and Courrèges; glossy leather minis at Khaite and Hermès; biker looks at Alexander McQueen, Alaïa and Miu Miu; and dominatrix-worthy latex leggings at Del Core and Versace.

VERSACE
RAF SIMMONS

Utilitarian looks, military-like fatigues and combat pants were also front and centre, from flight suits and tactical vests at Salvatore Ferragamo, Simone Rocha, Private Policy, 3.1 Philip Lim, Nehera and Rejina Pyo to the evergreen track suit at brands including Balenciaga, Elie Saab and even Roksanda, thanks to her collab with Fila. Huge coats stalked the runways, the most striking including Saint Laurent’s voluminous and incredibly realistic faux minks and Glenn Martens’ fantastical, floor-sweeping shag coats for Diesel, fashioned from strips of distressed denim. Voluminous ponchos also prevailed at Gabriela Hearst, Zimmermann, Jonathan Simkhai, Chloé, Roberto Cavalli, Nina Ricci, Kenzo and many others.

Plaid and tartan — both fabrics with longstanding menswear associations — were also everywhere. From oversized houndstooth minis at Versace to Punk Rock tartan trousers at Vivienne Westwood, mix-and-match plaids at Marine Serre and Roberto Cavalli and plaid trouser suits at Marni and Gucci. Chanel dedicated its entire show to tweed, a fabric to which Gabrielle Chanel was first introduced by her lover the Duke of Westminster, after travelling with him to Scotland. Borrowing his tweed jackets to wear, she would later adapt them into one of her brand’s hallmarks: the Chanel suit.

220220 Simone Rocha AW22

Credit: Ben Broomfield
Credit Social: @photobenphoto
Copyright: Ben Broomfield Photography
07734 852620
[email protected]
www.benbroomfield.com

This season’s bralette, the corset was omnipresent, worn over shirts at Fendi, embroidered in a trompe l’oeil effect over garments at Schiaparelli, moulded in zippered leather and shearling at Dion Lee and embellished with three stripes at Gucci, courtesy of its new Adidas collab. At Christian Dior there were adjustable, laced versions with tactical black strapping that looked like Kevlar vests. The collection was presented inside what Dior called a “militant art gallery”: a vast, 36m x 9m installation of 54 artworks by Italian feminist artist Mariella Bettineschi, who is known for her surrealist reworking of Old Master portraits of women, such as Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring and Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Lady With an Ermine. Bettineschi duplicates, then splices the subjects’ faces together, to give each face four eyes. The point of this effect, according to Christian Dior, is to “question the judgment that has conditioned — and still conditions — women past and present”.

EVERY DAY I go out in the world in my own version of SOCIALLY DISTANCED ARMOUR, but beneath that armour is a real desire to TOUCH, to FEEL, to be tender, to be VULNERABLE

Daniel Roseberry

Once considered an instrument of torture, the corset re-emerged as a symbol of feminine empowerment in the 1980s, first seen in the collections of Vivienne Westwood and Jean Paul Gaultier. For her Stature of Liberty corset, Westwood had been inspired, she said, by the first sexual revolution of the 18th century. The Georgian period of 1714-1837, which included the Regency era, provided the historical backdrop to Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton books, which inspired the recent smash hit Netflix series of the same name. The series has prompted a well-documented spike in corset sales in the past year.

SCHIAPARELLI

More recent corset adoptees include Dion Lee, Nensi Dojaka and Schiaparelli creative director Daniel Roseberry, for whom the cone bra has become something of a go-to. Gaultier unveiled his cone bra dress in 1984, later adapting the look to create the iconic pink silk corset for Madonna’s 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour. For fall, Schiaparelli’s cone bra offerings include a not-for-the- faint-hearted “moulded boob tube”, featuring exaggerated pointed breasts that jut out a good six inches from the chest.

“It’s tender, it’s savage,” says Roseberry, of the latter. “Which makes sense, because that’s how I feel much of the time these days. Every day I go out in the world in my own version of socially distanced armour, but beneath that armour is a real desire to touch, to feel, to be tender, to be vulnerable. I want to give women clothes to run the world in, yes — but, equally, clothes to fall in love in. Can’t we have both? Can’t we want both? Can’t we be both?”

This article originally appeared in the May issue of Harper’s BAZAAR Australia/New Zealand. Get a copy delivered to your doorstep here.

Post Navigation

Previous Walmart Launches Top Search Trends Report for API Partners
Next National Indigenous Fashion Awards nominees named

More Stories

How Fashion Illustration Shapes the Style Industry
  • Fashion Illustration

How Fashion Illustration Shapes the Style Industry

Christine A. Oritz July 13, 2025
Fashion Illustration Tips for Aspiring Artists
  • Fashion Illustration

Fashion Illustration Tips for Aspiring Artists

Christine A. Oritz June 28, 2025
Fashion Illustration and Its Role in Runway Shows
  • Fashion Illustration

Fashion Illustration and Its Role in Runway Shows

Christine A. Oritz June 16, 2025
July 2025
M T W T F S S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  
« Jun    

Archives

  • July 2025
  • June 2025
  • May 2025
  • April 2025
  • March 2025
  • February 2025
  • January 2025
  • December 2024
  • November 2024
  • September 2024
  • August 2024
  • July 2024
  • June 2024
  • May 2024
  • April 2024
  • March 2024
  • February 2024
  • January 2024
  • December 2023
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • September 2023
  • August 2023
  • July 2023
  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • April 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • March 2020
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • January 2017

Categories

  • Fashion Designer
  • Fashion Illustration
  • Fashion Jewerly
  • Fashion News
  • Fashion Outfits
  • Pet
  • Shopping

Recent Posts

  • Travel-Friendly Outfits for Jetsetters
  • 5 Remarkable Benefits of Laser Treatments for Skin
  • How Fashion Illustration Shapes the Style Industry
  • How to Spot Quality Jewelry: A Quick Guide
  • Top Fashion Designer Tips for Aspiring Creatives

Fiverr

Fiverr Logo

Tags

"Cats Model Fashion 2020 Andres Ankle Jeans Fashion Nova Argonian Fashion Eso Baum Und Pferdgarten Fashion Show Biology To Fashion Article Black Shoes Casual Fashion Buzz Fashion Barstow Color Bleeding Clothes Fashion Cum Town Fashion Podcast Cute Keychain Fashion Does Cato Fashion Drug Test Fall Fashion Trends Seattle Fashion Blog Doctor Fashion Design Degree 08096 Fashion Designing Uni In Lahore Fashion Dresses 2017 Tumblr Fashion For Shuggie Lyrics Fashion Jewelry Wholesale Manhattan Fashion Of The 2000 Fashion Stackable Enamel Rings Forever 21 Summer 2016 Fashion French Fashion Series" Gold Lariat Necklace Fashion Jewelry Go To Pieces Fashion High Fashion Using Lines Inditex Fashion Group Wiki Korean Fashion Fall Asian Korean Mens Fashion 2014 Kylesonthemove Kyle Fashion Flickr Lady Fashion Flohmarkt Erfahrungen Lea Chen Wharton Fashion Mejores Street Fashion Models Names Men'S Coachella Fashion Pastel Men'S Corporate Fashion Summer Mens Fashion Wrist Bands Mens Rubber Boots Fashion Oscars Fashion Gallery Persian Man Fashion Pittsburgh Fashion Trucks Platform Wedges Korean Fashion Plus Size Fashion *Mall Reddit Historical Fashion Sexy Crossdresser Fashion Techies Fashion Guys The Fashion Project Iowa
poshiva
peachboom

You may have missed

Travel-Friendly Outfits for Jetsetters
  • Fashion Outfits

Travel-Friendly Outfits for Jetsetters

Christine A. Oritz July 15, 2025
5 Remarkable Benefits of Laser Treatments for Skin
  • Fashion News

5 Remarkable Benefits of Laser Treatments for Skin

Christine A. Oritz July 15, 2025
How Fashion Illustration Shapes the Style Industry
  • Fashion Illustration

How Fashion Illustration Shapes the Style Industry

Christine A. Oritz July 13, 2025
How to Spot Quality Jewelry: A Quick Guide
  • Fashion Jewerly

How to Spot Quality Jewelry: A Quick Guide

Christine A. Oritz July 10, 2025
Top Fashion Designer Tips for Aspiring Creatives
  • Fashion Designer

Top Fashion Designer Tips for Aspiring Creatives

Christine A. Oritz July 9, 2025
7meel.com | CoverNews by AF themes.

WhatsApp us