Exciting debuts! Supermodel comebacks! Blowout runway shows! If we weren’t quite back to business as usual in 2022, fashion was bigger, louder, and brighter than it’s been since the Before Times.
It started on a high note, with Glenn Martens’s astonishing haute couture collection for Jean Paul Gaultier and Matthieu Blazy’s stellar debut at Bottega Veneta. We couldn’t get enough of the star-is-born red carpet style of Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet. And who can forget Rihanna’s baby bump reveal?
But the designer exits and advertising controversies of the last few weeks suggest that the pandemic isn’t quite done with us yet. We continue to see its after-effects on independent labels, and consumers, too, have changed, demanding more from the brands they follow and buy, which in turn is inspiring reflection and reevaluation on the part of fashion’s biggest names.
So what does all this say about 2023? We’ll be dashing from men’s show to men’s show in a matter of weeks, and to the women’s collections not long after that, but we’ve got big picture questions on our minds. How do we do more with less? How can small brands make big impacts? And what lessons can fashion learn from Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard, who gave away his company with the goal of combating climate change. As we look ahead, here are the moments that shaped fashion this year.
Rihanna Debuts Her Baby Bump in (Street) Style
Rihanna is the queen of street style. So when it came time to announce her pregnancy, she chose a vintage Chanel puffer and Christian Lacroix jewelry, and took to the streets of Harlem with her partner A$AP Rocky to make it official. Shot by the famed celebrity paparazzo Diggzy and revealed on Instagram on February 2, the photos practically broke the internet. Then it happened all over again when the Annie Leibowitz portrait of the superstar in a custom-made Alaia red lace catsuit made Vogue’s May cover.
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Matthieu Blazy’s Blazing Bottega Veneta Debut
Of the many hundreds of collections we covered at Vogue Runway this year, it was Matthieu Blazy’s fantastic fall 2022 debut at Bottega Veneta that generated the most heat. The collection, which followed the abrupt departure of Blazy’s predecessor Daniel Lee (recently named to the top job at Burberry), made our most-viewed shows list that season, taking the sixth spot. Fashion loves a first time, sure, but what made the show really one to watch were Blazy’s bona fides. He was a well-regarded behind-the-scenes guy with experience at Raf Simons’s Calvin Klein, Phoebe Philo–era Celine, and Maison Margiela, as well as at Lee’s Bottega Veneta, until this collection made him fashion’s new favorite front man. “The idea was to bring back energy, a silhouette that really expressed motion, because Bottega is a bag company, so you go somewhere, you don’t stay home. This collection basically is a journey,” he said at the time, and we’ve all been happy to tag along.
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The Rise of Glenn Martens
Every so often, a designer comes along who captures the zeitgeist in a particularly poignant way. This was the year of Glenn Martens. It started with a viral date night that saw Julia Fox play dress-up in a room full of the Belgian designer’s work for Diesel, directing a spotlight on the designer’s reinvigoration of the Italian denim giant. Then came his star turn at Jean Paul Gaultier haute couture, dresses from which turned up at the Oscars on Jada Pinkett Smith and as part of Kylie Jenner’s Bride of Frankenstein Halloween costume. Rihanna recently wore a hulking shearling coat with matching thigh-high boots from his Y/Project label, but it just might be the sexy fun of the trompe l’oeil body print pieces from his Jean Paul Gaultier collaboration that kept him on everyone’s lips this year—good luck trying to score one for yourself if you haven’t yet.
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Julia Fox Says You Can DIY, Too
Julia Fox is one of 2022’s breakout stars–one of the year’s main characters, if you will. Her much gossiped-about fling earlier this year was blessedly short-lived, but she’s managed to remain queen of the headlines by way of a distinct fashion style, specifically through her revealing and eccentric DIY looks. First came an über low-rise pair of jeans, with the waistband turned upside-down and worn as a bandeau top; then a classic white ribbed tank top cut apart and turned into a crop top and skirt. See also the beach towel Fox turned into a dress, which came with a viral TikTok tutorial. In fact, it’s Fox’s TikTok that has garnered her a sort of cult following, with folks seeing a previously unknown side of the anything-but-mainstream downtown New York personality.
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Kim Kardashian’s Marilyn Dress Breaks the Internet
This year’s Met Gala theme was Gilded Glamour, and Kim Kardashian certainly delivered when she wore Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress. Based on a sketch by Bob Mackie for the Hollywood costume designer Jean-Louis, the see-through frock caused its first stir when Monroe wore it to serenade President John F. Kennedy on his 45th birthday in 1962. It sold at auction in 1999 for over a $1 million as part of Monroe’s estate sale at Christie’s, then for a whooping $4.8 million at Julien’s Auctions in 2016, and was later acquired by Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum, which lent it to Kardashian. To this day, it holds the record for being the most expensive dress sold at auction. Kardashian only wore the real dress as she hobbled up the museum’s steps, then donned a replica for the rest of the night. Even still, the look was the most talked about of this year’s Met Gala, with some questioning the rewearing of a precious piece of fashion history, and others problematizing her dramatic weight-loss to fit into the dress. Still, many believe she is a pop icon to rival Marilyn.
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Fashion’s Ultimate It Girl, Chloë Sevigny, Ties the Knot in a Trifecta of Designer Dresses
It girls come and go, but Chloë Sevigny remains. The actress married her art gallery director husband, Siniša Mačković, back in 2020, but their wedding celebration was postponed due to the pandemic. When it finally came time to celebrate she didn’t disappoint her fashion fans. First came a sheer ruffled dress from Glenn Martens’s Jean Paul Gaultier couture collection (See? Martens did take over pop culture). Then a softly draped Loewe dress by Jonathan Anderson for the reception, followed by a lacy custom bridal catsuit by Casey Cadwallader for Mugler for the dance floor. That Sevigny chose to wear three buzzy designers that have made waves over the last year is no coincidence—she’s always leading the pack.
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Life in Plastic (and Pink), It’s Fantastic!
Who is the muse of the moment? Emily Ratajkowksi, Hailey Bieber, and Zendaya are all good guesses, but if you ask us, 2022 belonged to Barbie. Early images of the upcoming Greta Gerwig film, starring Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as her boyfriend Ken, set the internet ablaze, and their kooky outfits monopolized our attention all summer long. We talk about It girls and influencers all the time, but Barbie has been around since 1959—now, that is staying power.
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Lisa and V Were the Show Outside the Show at Paris Menswear Fashion Week
With Cher’s surprise appearance at Balmain and Taylor Russell’s at Loewe, celebrity cameos at fashion week have become a sure bet. But no other star spotting caused as much commotion as the arrival of Blackpink’s Lisa and BTS’s Kim Taehyung, a.k.a. V, at Hedi Slimane’s spring 2023 show for Celine in June. On the day of the show, hoards of K-pop fans gathered outside of Paris’s Palais de Tokyo awaiting the couple’s arrival. Such were the crowds that it was reported that attendees had to be escorted through the runway’s backstage area to exit. Lisa and V missed the Celine show in Los Angeles last week, when will we see them next?
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Timothée and Haider, A Match Made in Fashion Heaven
Everything that Timothée Chalamet wears we talk about, but none of his sartorial choices generate more buzz than those conjured up in collaboration with Haider Ackermann. Their relationship goes back to Chalamet’s Call Me By Your Name breakout, when Ackermann was still leading Berluti and the young star attended his fall 2018 show, calling the designer “the closest thing to what an auteur is in fashion.” Ever since, anytime Chalamet premieres a film in Venice, he wears a piece custom-made by Ackermann. First came the silver suit with an exterior cummerbund for the 2019 premiere of The King, then the streamlined crystal-embellished black two-piece for the 2021 launch of Dune. This year, it was the much-discussed backless red halter-neck top and matching trousers he sported at the Bones & All premiere. Credit the distinct tailoring, the unorthodox fabrics, or the subversion of traditional menswear codes, but something about the Chalamet/Ackermann combo seems to have us all bewitched. Here’s to a Timmy sighting when Ackermann takes his turn as guest designer at Jean Paul Gaultier couture in January.
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The Chameleon Returns: Linda Evangelista Teams Up With Steven Meisel for Fendi
Linda Evangelista knows how to make an entrance. Appearing on the runway for the first time in over a decade, she closed the Fendi show that Kim Jones staged in New York wearing a sweeping Tiffany & Co.–blue cape. For arm candy she had an engraved sterling silver Baguette bag and Marc Jacobs, who led the audience in a standing ovation for the supermodel chameleon. The Fendi appearance and accompanying Steven Meisel–lensed campaign marked Evangelista’s return to fashion after speaking out about a failed cosmetic procedure with CoolSculpting. She also graced the cover of the September issue of British Vogue, which was likewise photographed by Meisel, with whom she collaborated so closely in the ’90s. The evidence of that partnership is currently on view at a Zara-sponsored Meisel exhibit in Corduna, Spain. Here’s to many more happy returns from the iconic model in 2023.
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Harry’s Style Conquers Madison Square Garden
On September 21, Harry Styles finished a historic 15-night run at Madison Square Garden in New York City. “As It Was,” the lead single from his new album, Harry’s House, spent 15 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, but it is Styles’s style (say that three times fast) that took over the internet this year. Each night on Twitter, Harry’s stylist Harry Lambert made a habit of sharing the performer’s tour outfits—usually a custom Gucci look paired with a colorful pair of Adidas Sambas—and every morning our TikTok For You pages were dominated by clips of his performances and close-ups of his looks. Styles and Gucci have definitely left their mark—there’s a banner hanging in the Garden celebrating the 15-night run. The big question is: With his pal Alessandro Michele out at Gucci, what will Styles wear for his next mega tour?
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Bye-Bye Billions: Patagonia Founder Gave Away His Company in Search of Greener Pastures (and Solutions)
Yvon Chouinard, the rock climber turned billionaire owner of Patagonia, gave away his company in September. Here was a fashion big shot rethinking his role in the industry, and reimagining what can be done with product, profit, and cultural cachet. Rather than selling Patagonia or taking it public, Chouinard and his family transferred ownership of the company, which was valued at $3 billion at the time, to a trust and nonprofit organization, which were created to ensure that all the company’s profits are used to combat climate change and protect undeveloped land.
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The Staying Power of Telfar’s Bushwick Birkin
The past few years have seen Telfar Clemens’s signature faux leather shopping bag evolve from best seller to It bag to cultural phenomenon. The Bushwick Birkin got a namecheck in Beyoncé’s “Summer Renaissance.” In September, Telfar took over a Rainbow store in downtown Brooklyn, bringing its “Not for you—for everyone” tagline to life and making over 3,500 units of the handbag available for customers in the label’s first brick-and-mortar pop-up. Let’s just say a frenzy ensued. As successful as Telfar’s online drops are, is a permanent shop in the brand’s future?
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The Arrival of Bella Hadid, Gen Z’s Supermodel
The word supermodel gets thrown around too easily these days, but the industry and the internet agree that Bella Hadid has earned the coveted descriptor. Yes, 2021 was a fantastic year for Hadid—who can forget the Schiaparelli she wore to the Cannes Film Festival? But it was 2022 that brought the model her first solo Vogue cover, a viral moment at Coperni’s recent show that generated $26.3 million worth of coverage (according to Launchmetrics data), and social media’s fixation on her each and every outfit. Lighthearted memes about Bella posing at a gas station, that spray-on Coperni dress becoming a popular Halloween costume, and a sound bite of her saying “so, my name is…Bella Hadid” getting used for 155,700 videos (and counting) on TikTok are all signs that Gen Z has embraced her as the decade’s first super. In case this needed any confirmation, she picked up the Model of the Year prize at the Fashion Awards in London earlier this month.
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The End of an Era: Tom Ford Finds a Buyer in the Estée Lauder Companies
When Freddie Mercury’s “Time Waits for No One” played on the soundtrack of Tom Ford’s spring 2023 show at New York Fashion Week in September, it sounded like an epigraph. The internet keeps resurfacing the designer’s tone-setting collections for Gucci (it even proposed that he return to the label in the wake of Alessandro Michele’s departure last week), but Ford is ready to move on. Tom Ford, the label, was sold to Estée Lauder companies in a $2.8 billion deal last month. According to reports, Ford will stay on with the brand through 2023. It’s safe to assume that Gucci isn’t in Ford’s future, but here’s to hoping he returns to the director’s chair and makes another feature film.
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Raf Simons’s Namesake Label Joins the 27 Club
Is there anything more 2022 than announcing the closing of your label via an Instagram post? That’s what Raf Simons did when he announced he would be shuttering his namesake label early last week with a short but sweet sign-off. Simons launched his label in 1995 and quickly gained cult status with his youth culture inspired collections. Now, as Vogue Runway’s Sarah Mower pointed out, he’s taken a page from his designer idol Helmut Lang and exited at the top of his game. Simons’s fans, in turn, will be battling it out for their favorite pieces on resale sites. But Simons is still very much in the picture. The next time we’ll see him will be in January at Prada’s menswear show, where he has been co-creative director of the label since early 2020.
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Alessandro Michele Says Arrivederci, Exits Gucci
With his magpie, maximalist sensibility and eye for attention-grabbing collaborations, Alessandro Michele made Gucci one of fashion’s most sought after labels in his seven years in the creative director chair. Celebrities like Billie Eilish, Jared Leto, Beyoncé, and Harry Styles were all Michele loyalists. The brand’s in-house design team will continue to produce collections until a successor is announced. What’s next for Michele is not yet clear, but considering his massive success and sui generis aesthetic, Gucci was just the beginning for him, not the end.
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One Year Without Virgil
This Monday marked the year anniversary of Virgil Abloh’s passing, and 2022 was dedicated to commemorating his legacy. First came Louis Vuitton’s staging of Abloh’s final collection at a runway show titled “Louis Dreamhouse,” then a Nike and Louis Vuitton exhibition of Abloh’s Air Force 1 designs in New York, followed by one final goodbye from the French house at a touching runway show in June, where Kendrick Lamar performed. This week at Art Basel in Miami, Nike is honoring Abloh once more with a new exhibition “Virgil Abloh: The Codes c/o Architecture.” But even a year later, this chapter is not yet finished. While Off-White staged its first show without Abloh’s oversight in September under the direction of Ib Kamara, Louis Vuitton has yet to announce Abloh’s successor. There’s a little more than three weeks until the start of the menswear collections in January, so stay tuned.
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Originally posted from “VOGUE” by JOSÉ CRIALES-UNZUETA
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