Fall 2023 Trend: Catch the Train
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Move over micro-mini, there’s a new skirt silhouette taking over this season as designers hopped on the long train for fall, embracing mullet, mermaid and trumpet dresses for evening that added some much needed drama to the season’s mostly neutral utilitarian day looks.
At Victoria Beckham, the British designer attempted to reconcile the fantasy of Paris fashion and the reality of cultivating her customer. Alongside more commercial sharp-shouldered tailoring, “Beckham pushed the idea of playing dress-up with off-kilter silk patchwork pleat dresses adorned with feathers [and] 1940s starlet gowns and underpinnings,” wrote WWD’s West Coast executive editor Booth Moore, noting that Beckham was inspired by socialite-turned-eccentric Edith Bouvier Beale, as depicted first in the 1975 documentary “Grey Gardens,” and in the 2009 dramatization starring Drew Barrymore.
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Rick Owens, on the other hand, had the work of photographer Richard Avedon on his mind, telling international editor Miles Socha backstage, “I wish that was my dress Dovima was wearing with the elephants.” Anyway, this is my version,” he said of the sequin gowns matched with big, squishy duvet filled donuts paired with the designer’s now signature monster platform boots.
As usual, “there was lots of black, including…tube dresses slashed up one side and trailing a long, lopsided train that occasionally got tangled up in the raised catwalk rigging,” Socha observed at the show.
For his farewell to Moschino, Jeremy Scott went out with a bang, experimenting with midcentury couture hinged on 1980s punk references. “The show climaxed with a parade of elaborate evening gowns, some sculpted in jewel-toned taffeta, others paved in crystal embroideries,” Socha wrote in his review.
Equally glamorous dresses mopped up the runways of Givenchy and Balmain where both houses’ designers Matthew Williams and Olivier Rousteing, respectively, dove head-first into the archives.
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