Wearing Your Politics on Your Sleeve

Fashion is often called a social mirror, part of its role being to reflect the zeitgeist while putting clothes on people’s backs. So politicized fashion isn’t exactly new — think Vivienne Westwood’s Seventies punk, Katharine Hamnett’s graphic T-shirts in the Eighties or even Christian Dior’s revolutionary New Look of the Forties. But it’s very of the now. It may feel cynically commercial to lump positive political messaging in with standard seasonal trends, such as red, Eighties, arts and crafts and fur details, yet ruminations on and reactions to the upheaval sweeping Western civilization were everywhere during the fall collections. At times, designers spelled it out — literally – with blatant messaging printed across garments in collections including Christian Siriano, Prabal Gurung, Public School and Versace. Angela Missoni turned her show into her own mini Women’s March, giving each guest, model and backstage hand a pink “pussy” hat made in the Missoni mills. Other designers handled topical issues with more subtlety, making female empowerment, hope, love, diversity and inclusiveness the subject of backstage conversations or working ideas into their show through casting, narrative and silhouette. Two prime examples of that were Undercover, where Jun Takahashi staged a theatrical alternate reality of otherworldly creatures

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