OUT OF BOUNDS

The enfant terribles of fashion were once easy to identify. Today, subversion is more subjective.

By Amy Fine Collins

Last spring, I attended the Whitney Biennial with my friend Pamela, who, like me, studied to be an art historian and became a fashion professional. We wandered separately through the galleries but arrived at the same conclusion. By and large, the exhibition was a wasteland, with little evidence of taste, skill, craft, quality, or virtuosity in sight. We did concur that there was one noteworthy exception: a haunting black-and-white video installation by filmmaker Christopher Harris, which we both agreed was “elegant.” From there, we discussed how that word has nearly disappeared from the lexicon, not just of art, but more to the point, of fashion.

Somewhere along the line, fashion became hell-bent on destroying canonical principles of balance, grace, harmony, and finish. What began among designers as an actual exercise in overthrowing established norms devolved first into mannerism, and then into standard practice, devoid of any real meaning. What does destroying the rules signify if a designer never learned or understood them in the first place? To be a true subversive, practitioners must first have already mastered the precepts they are violating. Think of Picasso, who was perfectly fluent in the academic language of his métier, before he broke through with Cubism.

The same can be said of Karl Lagerfeld. He was fully versed in the hallowed codes of Chanel couture before he started taking them apart. Interestingly, one of the people whom I have admired most in my life, a fashion editor active from the 1930s to the ’90s, observed to me in the late ’80s that “Karl Lagerfeld is the one who made fashion ugly.” It is hard to see from the perspective of a person from another time period (my friend was born in 1913), but Babs, a consummate aesthete and intellectual, knew exactly what she was talking about. This was a woman, after all, who bought a Jackson Pollock painting from his first show at the Betty Parsons Gallery and Joseph Cornell boxes directly from the artist. I believe that Babs meant that, through calculated exaggerations of form, disruptions of scale, displacements of parts, and logomania—in other words, by playing fast and loose with the house founder’s iconography—Lagerfeld had willfully turned the Chanel look into an opulent cartoon. On top of all that, he smashed industry templates (seemingly for good) for how designers are employed and brands are revived.

So yes, Lagerfeld was a true subversive. And, for that matter, so was Armani. Listen to what America’s original fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert (born 1903) said to me about the Italian, circa 1989: “Armani ruined menswear.” There is no way today to re-experience what it was like for a fashion savant of her generation to witness the stuffing get knocked out of men’s suiting. Chanel was herself at her most subversive when she appropriated the beige jersey of men’s undergarments for women’s dresses. Her audacious invasion into taboo male territory was even more risqué than commonly assumed, as fashion historian Caroline Milbank recently rediscovered. What would have been obvious to any contemporary looking at Chanel’s 1926 jersey dresses, Milbank observes, was not just the knit fabric’s intimate origins, but also the fact that “the bodice was cut exactly like a man’s undershirt, fastening to the side with a half placket. At the time a gentleman did not remove his jacket in mixed company, let alone wear an undershirt in public!”
It was no less subversive of Chanel’s nemesis, Dior, to bring back voluminous skirts constructed from vast yardages of precious textiles even as rationing persisted postwar. Though his work nowadays seems to embody a retrograde vision of femininity, in 1947, his romantic dream of “woman-flowers with willowy waists and spreading skirts” incited a conservative backlash, replete with anti-Dior demonstrations as far afield as Texas. So when asked, as I was by the editors of this magazine, to consider who recently has subverted fashion to the degree that Alexander McQueen did in his day, I had to revisit what the concept of subversion even means. Historically, at least, subversion seems to have involved a “shock of the new,” to use Robert Hughes’s phrase, whether the jolt was seismic or subtle. As the emerging Kazakhstan-born, New York-based designer Meruert Tolegen notes, subversion can “hint at certain messaging or ideas without much intrigue or noise around it.”

Fashion is still construed to be subversive when it is kinky, menacing, or battered, and generated by an enfant terrible in the McQueen mold. Yet Thom Browne, probably the greatest subverter of the 21st century so far, has instigated radical change in such a reticent, steady, and orderly manner that it was accomplished almost by stealth. Even while upholding the most rigorous technical standards of tailoring and dressmaking, he has deconstructed and reconstructed them. He has altered the proportions of the male physique and drawn attention to erogenous zones heretofore obscured by business suits—specifically, the ankles and buttocks—by cutting jackets more snugly and cropping trousers shorter. He has converted the elite, archaic symbols of preppy dressing—whales, anchors, ducks—into eccentric, classless signifiers. And more than anyone else of our epoch, he has been responsible for normalizing gender-fluid dressing. For perhaps the first time in centuries, a man can look properly attired in a skirt, and appear as manly in this traditionally female staple as a Roman soldier in his pteruges. “It’s simply not possible for men’s wear to ever be the same again,” journalist Tim Blanks declared in 2007, when Thom Browne first paraded a man down the runway in a bridal train. Thom also accustomed our eyes to the sight of women of all shapes, sizes, colors, heights, and ages in ties, trousers, and pocket squares. His natty women in gray flannel suits are today’s descendants of those ladies who slipped into Poiret’s 1911 harem-style pants, so alarming that Pope Pius X publicly denounced them. (They were, after all, in flagrant violation of Deuteronomy 22:5.)

Yves Saint Laurent’s subversive 1966 “smoking” pantsuit also provoked vociferous opprobrium, albeit from more worldly sources. “I remember when Françoise Hardy wore a smoking to the opera in Paris,” Saint Laurent recalled. “Scandal. People screamed and hollered. It was an outrage.” Julia Fox may have seemed subversive in her kooky get-up of white tulle veil and black thong, or Demna with his Spring ’25 peekaboo garter-and-lace bodysuits, but their sartorial experiments are a not-so-faraway echo of YSL’s investigations into semi-nudity and transparency, a subject explored in the recent illuminating Musée Yves Saint Laurent’s retrospective, Sheer. And let us not forget the precursors to them all, the effete, fearless Merveilleuses of the Directoire period, who moistened their already daringly diaphanous dresses in an attempt to simulate the see-through, clingy “wet drapery” look of Greek statuary. But my favorite fashion subversion of the French Revolutionary period (or maybe any period) was the style à la victime, which featured red ribbons tied around the neck and trussed around the body to suggest the gory consequences of the guillotine.

In the 20th century, America’s foremost modernist Geoffrey Beene habitually exposed (sometimes teasingly, with trompe-l’œil) unusual areas of a woman’s anatomy, such as the diaphragm and the iliac crest. (He was a former medical student.) I remember one overbearing husband telling his wife circa 1990 she looked like a “whore” in Beene’s magnificent Metamorphosis dress (now at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute) because it revealed delicate, arcing, pincer-like slivers of her hip bones. This banker bro would surely have felt less threatened if his wife had displayed “low-and-behold” cleavage. To facilitate a woman’s mobility, even in the most formal settings, Beene also figured out how to make billowy, swirling ball gowns nearly weightless—very convenient for hasty exits. That, to me, is subversive, and a forgotten art. The prickly designer, who was given to oracular pronouncements, used to speak of mixing “the humble with the rich”—which might mean that a dress concocted from a sumptuous Abraham silk incorporated plastic surgical tubing as a structural element. He also used to declare that “the future of fashion is in a test tube.” (He was obsessed with Ealing Studios’s The Man in the White Suit.) His protégé Alber Elbaz, with his unorthodox raw finishes and signature inside-out grosgrain trims, partially fulfilled that prophecy by elevating techno fabrics to the level of luxury materials, while Iris van Herpen, in her way, has gone even further with her 3D-printed polyamides.

So far, I have been addressing only subversions of an aesthetic kind. In the 21st century, the whole commercial enterprise of fashion has been subverted by a few huge conglomerates, who through strategic acquisitions and manipulations of the digital infosphere have become nation-states that now govern our closets. Luxury fashion has not been in the hands of such centralized, absolute powers since the reign of Louis XIV. (That the largest of these corporate behemoths are based in France is not a coincidence.) Subversion, it seems, can mean moving either forward or backward, and is just as likely to be reactionary as it is progressive. It’s not intrinsically a desirable value, so why in fashion is it always spoken of as one? Perhaps we need to reassess the word or dispose of it altogether.

During New York Fashion Week, which coincided with my writing this piece, I was looking, as at the Whitney Biennial, for work that was both transgressive and elegant. Ideally, I would discover a collection so well-made, so sensorily engaging, so refined, and so discreetly insurgent that it would be impossible to convey its allure through Instagram, TikTok, or any other digital media. I didn’t find it, of course. I don’t think such a thing can exist in New York or anywhere else anymore, so long as fashion is in the thrall of, and complicit with, social media. The most subversive clothing I saw during Fashion Month was not, in fact, on a runway or on the street at all, but on stage, on Janelle Monáe, at a music festival in Queens. Performing “Pynk” in Duran Lantink’s ruffled vagina pants and jaunty matching headdress, the entertainer struck another blow to the patriarchy with more panache, wit, and conviction than Dior’s parade of morose Amazons and Dianas five days earlier in Paris.

I remember Bill Cunningham once became so discouraged with the possibilities left for invention in fashion that he decided the locus of transformation had migrated from clothing to the bodies beneath them. To make his case, he ran a collage in his Sunday New York Times “On the Street” column celebrating the proliferating trends in body modifications, wrought by tattoos, gyms, surgery, and the like. According to Harold Koda, former Curator-in-Chief of the Met’s Costume Institute, “In a world where anything goes nothing can be truly subversive. You need some prevailing status quo before you can undermine or resist. Without something to push against you have nothing to subvert.” The British-Canadian designer Edeline Lee, who held her first runway presentation during London Fashion Week in September 2024, doesn’t quite agree: “It’s somehow subversive to aspire to be a lady these days,” she remarks. “I always say I design for the Future Lady—my imaginary muse that represents what a girl today might aspire to become: beautiful, dignified, kind, intelligent, graceful, powerful, and free.”

It may be that the term “subversive” nowadays is an entirely subjective and personal notion, not a sweeping cultural one. In his youth, Christopher Isherwood asked rhetorically, “What revolution can I promote but a revolution inside myself?” Most of the young designers I spoke to seem to believe earnestly in the subversive capabilities of their own work, which they also regard as instruments of their own individual revolts. The niche American designer Batsheva Hay, whose quirky, intelligent collections reference dowdy housewives and religious-sect frumps, explained, “I do consider my collections subversive. I started my brand as an output for pent-up feelings: feeling stuck in a domestic life as a new mother, feeling irrelevant in the world as an unemployed person… I used clothing as a tool to play with my identity, and I think it resonated with a lot of people.” Each one to her own subversion. If, as Koda suggests, you need “something to push against” for subversion to take place, that something might be yourself.