Maybe it was already in the wind? Luxury sales are slowing worldwide and a large cohort of designers — or perhaps their brands’ merchandisers — seemed to sense the new mood, sending out a parade of collections for spring 2024 of chic, wearable and dare we say, simple, clothes in an attempt to spur consumers to open their wallets come next season.
Leading the way for the normcore trend is Miuccia Prada, who recently snagged the number-one spot on Lyst’s hottest brand index for Miu Miu. Backstage at her show during Paris Fashion Week, WWD international editor Miles Socha reported the designer “wore a sleek, tawny brown leather coat which had an unusual feature: a black knit hood hanging from under the collar.” The collection followed suit, he observed, chockablock with such odd fashion bedfellows, like a petticoat with a blazer, or Neoprene shorts with a polo sweater and overcoat.
“I think that the attention has to be on the person,” Prada said, and the people she referenced this season weren’t high-fashion individuals, but common folk like security guards, surfers, schoolgirls, preppies and librarians.
Their utilitarian wardrobes filled the collections of Stella McCartney, Max Mara, Brandon Maxwell and Gucci, where new designer Sabato De Sarno hit the reset button on Alessandro Michele’s maximalist leanings with elegant daywear that WWD West Coast editor Booth Moore noted had a ’60s-meets-’90s sensibility.
At Chanel, Virginie Viard flew the flag for French girl chic, grounding classic tweed jackets with denim and flats. “Designers galore still trade off that look,” wrote WWD Paris Bureau chief Joelle Diderich.
Jonathan Anderson gets a thrill out of turning similarly utilitarian pieces into full-fledged fashion moments. At Loewe, he carried over the elongated blazers in menswear fabrics and hiked up trousers from his menswear into his women’s collection. Anderson pushed the boundaries even further for his namesake line in London with plasticine shorts and hunched hoodies.
At the latter, Anderson said the buzz-word of the moment, “minimalism,” was on his mind, but as Socha wrote in his review of the collection, the term “is surely an insufficient description for simple clothes packed with so much attitude.”
