Who Wants to Be a Swan Anyway?

What makes a Swan anyway? The capital-S designation—Truman Capote’s nickname for a collective of mid-20th-century New York City socialites, including Babe Paley, Lee Radziwell, C.Z. Guest, and Slim Keith—is in the zeitgeist thanks to the second season of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series Feud, airing now. This season, the term has been used to describe a return to glamour and a revisiting of the elegant, sophisticated dress codes once upheld and often mandated by high society. But I don’t think there is a version of that kind of Swan that could exist today.

A modern swan is messier and busier, and (usually) working. And we see it all play out over social media, for better or worse. And thank god for all of that, because, hopefully, it reflects a more realistic version of her. Several standout collections in Paris shown recently seemed to speak to the complexities and contradictions of being a woman who is powerful, stylish, and flawed.

Most compelling was Jun Takahashi’s interpretation at Undercover. Models casually walked an empty concrete space in a university center while a recording played of director Wim Wenders reading his poem “Watching a Working Woman” about the day-to-day life of a 40-year-old single mom and lawyer. It was deeply moving, especially for those of us who are working moms: “As always, she wakes up just before the alarm goes off. As always, she looks at the clock and smiles, but turns it off before it would start ringing. She doesn’t want her child to wake up. Not yet.”

The words carry so much weight and so do we, which Takahashi visualized with a collection that was at once grounded in ritual but also sartorial prowess. Everyday cardigans and sweatshirts were patched with chiffons and tinsel and some trousers and jeans were done in a trompe l'oeil style. The last three looks featured the same banal denim, sweats, and sweaters, but illuminated by regal trains that looked heavenly parading through the show space. It was as if to say, these women are a kind of queen, at least when it comes to the dignity with which they live their day-to-day lives.

More moving actualizations of women today came through at The Row and Dries Van Noten. The former collection presented a polished woman you want to be—impossibly chic, annoyingly effortless, extremely self-assured. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have a deep understanding of how women who can afford extreme luxury want to dress and they’ve excelled at stringing her along with the introduction of certain design twists and turns. This season, they did so through cocooning outerwear shapes and sculptural pleating.

No photos or videos were allowed inside the small venue at The Row, which made for an intimate salon-style show that forced us to take in and delight in those considered details.

Dries Van Noten said it best in his collection notes: “She dares to cut her own fringe. Embraces the comfort of contradictions, her femininity at once tender and strong.” Van Noten is a master of rejiggering our notions of pretty clothes and nuanced glamour. His is a world where textures and prints smash into each other; sparkly sweaters were styled over backwards shirting with flipped up collars and some jackets and tops were adorned with bulbous sculptural fabric at the neck or bodice. The clothes were striking but unpretentious, lady-adjacent but way more artful than that–and somehow approachable too. What a feat!

Speaking of feats, the casting at Balmain was perfection. Olivier Rousteing showed exaggerated suiting and waist-cinching silhouettes on more than a few woman over the age if 40 which is a rarity on any runway, but particularly in Paris where the models tend to fit the mold (very young, very thin).

At Courrèges, Nicolas di Felice celebrated the feminine spirit in a sexier way with a lineup of sensual separates like upside-down tank dresses and draped Grecian-style tops. And of course, there were those pockets at the front of most of the garments—a place to slide your hand down and quite literally feel yourself. Cheeky, but also powerful. The scope of modern womanhood includes all of it, not just bits and pieces and nicknames for outdated categorizations of glamour. Thankfully, this fashion season is about embracing the whole.

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