Fashion
1. The satin dress in John Singer Sargent’s ‘Madame X’ painting (1884)
“It was designed by the sitter, Madame Pierre Gautreau [the Louisiana-born Virginie Amélie Avegno], an American Parisian socialite married to a French banker,” says the British Turkish fashion designer Erdem Moralioglu, 48. “The painting was completely scandalous because she’s depicted in this revealing black dress during an especially conservative time. There’s an eroticism in Sargent’s insinuation: A strap was originally painted to look like it had fallen off and was later repainted on. To me, it’s a beautiful example of feminine power.”
2. Henriette Negrin’s Delphos gown for Fortuny (1907)
“You could store it rolled up and it’s easily packable, which is so modern,” says the New York-based designer Rachel Scott, 42, the creative director of Proenza Schouler and of her own line, Diotima, about this pleated, column-shaped silk dress. Inspired by Greek tunics, Negrin created the garment in partnership with her husband, Mariano Fortuny, a Spanish-born Venetian designer and artist known for his innovative use of materials. “Its wearability, and the fact that it’s not fitted to one body, makes it modern,” Scott adds. “It influenced Madame Grès, Halston and Issey Miyake and feels like something that would still be revolutionary if it were made now.”
3. Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel’s little black dress (1926)
“By altering the size and length of what women wore, she changed their lifestyles,” says the American designer Norma Kamali, 80. Through her little black dress — which was often made from black crepe de Chine with a dropped waist and long sleeves — Chanel, who started replacing corsetry with looser, more comfortable jersey garments in the 1910s, said goodbye to restrictive clothing and elevated black into more than a mourning color. “She changed the way women walk, giving them the confidence and power to move through the world more easily,” Kamali says. “There are other designers who’ve changed women’s lives, but none as profoundly as Chanel.”
4. Christian Dior’s bar jacket (1947)
“With his New Look collection, Christian Dior changed fashion,” says Carla Sozzani, 78, the president and a co-founder of the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa, which recently opened an exhibition in Paris comparing the couture work of the Tunisian-born French designer Alaïa, who died in 2017, and that of Dior. With his Bar Jacket, a cream-colored silk shantung piece with a cinched waist and padded hips, Dior “brought the corset back [as well as rounded shoulders and structured busts], which had fallen out of fashion. At the same time, he brought back feminine lightness, which is still influencing not only the Dior collections [by Jonathan Anderson] but also Matières Fécales [a brand started by Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran]. When people want to design something feminine, they do a large skirt and a very tight jacket — the influence is eternal.”
5. The Angelina dashiki (1962)
“The dashiki is kind of a mystical garment,” says the American designer and creative director Edward Buchanan, 55. “We all recognize the dashiki print [often symmetrical, geometric and floral patterns centered on a V-shaped neckline] and know it relates to African people or their descendants. But it was created by Toon van de Mannaker, a Dutch designer working for the Netherlands-based textile company Vlisco. Eventually known as the Angelina, after a song of the same name by [the Ghanaian highlife band] the Sweet Talks, it was first produced in the early 1960s for Central and West African markets. In 1967, two New Yorkers named Jason Benning and Howard Davis started selling them in Harlem, and they took off. Worn by Black people during the civil rights and Black Power movements as a garment of protest, the dashiki was a symbol, or a sign, that you were part of a unified community, and still is.”
6. The miniskirt (mid-1960s)
“For the first time in history, women were wearing skirts above their knees or mid-thigh,” says Kamali about the advent of the miniskirt, which is often credited to Mary Quant, the English designer who popularized it in London in the early to mid-1960s, and to André Courrèges, the French designer who included it in a 1964 collection. (The one pictured here was produced by Annemarie Gardin, a New York-based Swiss designer from that era.) “People went crazy. They couldn’t believe it. I hemmed up my own skirts as quickly as you could imagine. Cars would screech to a halt and [people would] call me a prostitute!”
7. Yves Saint Laurent’s Le Smoking (1966)
“As the story goes, the classic tuxedo” — often made of velvet or satin and worn after dinner over formal evening attire — “was created for men to wear while they smoked cigars,” says Buchanan, so as to absorb the smell. “And then in 1966, Saint Laurent said, ‘I want to create a tuxedo for women.’ But he didn’t want to just put the man’s tuxedo on her, so he cut a new silhouette for a woman’s curves and gave it a more generous collar. For me, Le Smoking — that’s when the word ‘chic’ was created. All the subsequent women’s tuxedos” — from Marc Jacobs, Helmut Lang, Phoebe Philo or Stefano Pilati — “came from Le Smoking.”
8. Stephen Burrows’s lettuce-hem dresses (1970s)
“Most people don’t know that when they see a lettuce hem” — a wavy edge, normally reserved for knits — “at Miu Miu, Proenza Schouler or Rick Owens, he invented it,” Buchanan says about Burrows, the first Black American designer to achieve international recognition. “When you’re sewing the edge of the fabric, you stretch it out and then do an overlock stitch. When you let it go, it goes boing — creating a little rolled edge. That was his detail. Today, when everything is being upcycled and patchworked, designers are discovering the technique because it’s the easiest way to sew two pieces of fabric together.”
9. Azzedine Alaïa’s leggings (early 1980s)
“Nobody was doing this,” says Sozzani. “He was inspired by [the 20th-century French designer] Madeleine Vionnet’s work and the fact that she allowed the body to move freely. He developed all these yarns that allowed his creations to be like sculptures, introducing knitwear as a way of living. [Chanel and] Sonia Rykiel did knitwear before, but having so much of it in your wardrobe was unusual. Alaïa expanded from the leggings to dresses and coats — knitted everything.”
10. Alexander McQueen’s bumster pants (fall 1993)
“It was a weird proposal on sensuality and eroticism, highlighting a part of the body that you’d normally be disgusted by,” says Scott about the British provocateur’s low-slung trousers, which were cut to expose the top of the buttocks. “The grotesque became erotic. I love that tension between tailoring and eroticism. Bad taste, done expertly.”
11. Jean Paul Gaultier’s printed mesh tops (spring 1994)
“It was scandalous,” says Buchanan, referring to the French designer’s collection, which included trompe l’oeil mesh tops made to look like tattooed skin. “Pure provocation, along with skill and design. Remember, Gaultier was the one who taught [the avant-garde Belgian designer] Martin Margiela.”
12. Xuly Bët’s Puma collaboration (spring 1995)
“Created by the Malian designer Lamine Kouyaté, this collaboration was the first of its kind,” says Buchanan. “In the 1990s, if you were a sportswear brand, you stayed here, and if you were a luxury brand, you stayed over there. But Kouyaté” — who made colorful clothes out of recycled garments and dead-stock textiles — “was obsessed with sportswear, and he connected with Puma and they collaborated on this funky, cool streetwear collection. It included deconstructed dresses and tops in technical fabrics that had the Puma logo on them. It was so ahead of its time. [The ongoing partnership between] Yohji [Yamamoto] and Adidas’s Y-3 line wouldn’t have happened without it. [The British designer] Kim Jones and Supreme, or Balenciaga and Under Armour, wouldn’t have happened without it. He was the first.”
13. Marjan Pejoski’s swan dress (fall 2001)
“The Oscars are for the most conventionally dressed,” says Moralioglu. “And [in 2001, the Icelandic singer] Björk, who’s so culturally progressive, chose to wear a swan dress by [the Macedonian designer] Marjan Pejoski, which was totally crazy. But she looked amazing. It happened during a time of openness and exploration, and I think this dress encapsulates that.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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