Into the Sensual World
Fashion has a sexuality problem. So does everybody else.
Hi, sailor. Sending the Tuesday letter a day early as penance for last week’s missing OFF-MENU — and turning off the paywall for this one, too.
Probably all of you know about fashion’s sexuality problem; I talked about it over at Magdalene J. Taylor’s Many Such Cases a few weeks ago. To recap:
I think the closest example to [Elena Velez]’ strategy, at least this season, is Namilia, whose runway tack is to sexually discomfit. I don’t think they make interesting or well-constructed or even blithely satisfactory clothing, and they, too, play to the tenth row by collaborating with major brands (they have a collaboration with Dolls Kill in the year 2024). The ridicule Namilia gets, at least in serious fashion circles, is pretty well-deserved. It’s just not good.
The tricky thing is that Velez IS good. Her FW22 show was v decadent, aggressive, and sexually interesting… clothes that shouldn’t be sexy and yet are, not despite but because of their weirdness. I’d like to see a return to that.
Velez has also been pretty open about her struggles funding her work as a designer, so when it was announced she had so many partners for this show — including OnlyFans — I couldn’t really fault her. Even bigger designers like Brandon Maxwell had a Walmart pop-up shop after the show. It’s getting more and more difficult to run an independent brand, especially in the United States. It’s why Puppets and Puppets moved to London. We just don’t have the resources to support designers (or really anyone in a creative occupation). I think we’ll see more shows conspicuously sponsored by brands, at least in the US, across these coming seasons.
The clothes that both consumers and fashion snobs are really responding to right now tend to both sexy and sensual. As for SS25, Alaïa is a wonderful example; same goes for Frederick Anderson, Grace Ling, LaQuan Smith. Those are the shows I can’t stop hearing about. I think people are sick of costume-y, and dare I say, pornified visions of sexuality on the runway, and they want elegant, indulgent, sensual garments again. Mulier’s Alaïa proves you can do that and not be schmaltzy.
I still stand by all of this, even if it’s not particularly revelatory. Anyone can see that many designers prioritize easy, gobsmacking sexuality over messy eros. If you’ll let me: due to countless creative and financial imperatives, the runway has to be an orgasmic event. There is no budget for edging. For many brands, the afflatus doesn’t come from what will sell but what will get mood boarded and added to cart and wishlisted into infinity. That requires creating an essential contradiction for their consumers — a curiosity about what it would be like to wear a sexy, edgy garment, but a reticence to actually purchase it. You create that contradiction through a thousand little deaths. That’s what’s more interesting to me than any of these runways — how does fashion’s complicated relationship with sexuality affect how we, the hoi polloi, dress?
I hesitated to write about “sexy” clothing, which is usually conflated with clubwear, because I felt slightly paralyzed by it and knew, too, that my reaction was shared by so many others: it is difficult to critique a subject you have no experience in. For me, writing about ultra-sexy fashion would be not dissimilar to writing about 12th-century rabbinic literature or how to change a carburetor. I could feign my way in, but would you believe me? Fashion is too broad a subject for me to pretend like I have total psychic awareness of it all.
But it wasn’t until these past few weeks, in which I’ve been rebuilding my closet, that I’ve come face-to-face with what it means to dress and shop sexily. (I’m trying to scrape out some of the muck and elevate the basics, which I may write about in a future letter.) For the most part, my shopping is either done online or in secondhand, vintage stores; if I’m going to the mall, I’m most likely exchanging something purchased through the former. I love to shop, as a wholly nebulous verb, but the shopping experience — Top 40 radio on repeat, antiseptic overhead lighting, a thermostat kept two degrees warmer than I feel OK in — leaves me queasy. While trying on pants at an H&M circa 2015, I felt such a blinkered panic that I bought a pair of plaid cigarette pants that were not just hideous but two sizes too small. They were drenched in my sweat and I felt too ashamed to hang them back on a rack.
So you can imagine my unease at having to go into a store and try things on. But I had to, mainly because a pair of linen pants I wanted was only available for in-store pickup. As I ambled through the mall, I passed a troika of shops I’d never recognized, with glittery names like “Belladonna” or “City Classics.” Then, some more familiar storefronts, like Forever 21, Torrid, Express. In the windows: bandage dresses, Skims-esque slips with thigh-high slits, tank tops with necklines cut straight to the navel. It wasn’t so much that I was shocked by the garments themselves but rather their staggering quantity. Were people really buying all of this at such a frequency? Or was it more of a local thing? It was near-impossible to imagine the gossamer-thin clothing on my body. I am a 38DDD; what was the point in buying a completely sheer black top designed to accentuate the nipple, clearly pulled from Mulier’s Alaïa? Or a rip-off Miu Miu micro-miniskirt that showed the slight demarcation line between my thigh and ass? I didn’t go to the club. The parties I went to weren’t buttoned-up fêtes, but you dressed casually, “appropriately.” I had nowhere to wear these items. Maybe that was the problem. I asked single friends what they wore to clubs, bars: going-out tops with jeans, like in the aughts; fun, weird dresses; tank tops, midi skirts, knee boots. Every answer made me feel removed from the entire culture around me and, too, removed from myself. I always thought that my quasi-teetotalism held solely social consequences; I never thought there would be sartorial ones, too. Staring at these ugly facsimiles of runway fashion in the store windows, there was a kind of stinging recognition that gave way to deep shame. When I said I had no experience in sexy clothing, it came with an asterisk — I had no experience in sexy clothing as an adult.
As a teenager, I went to parties and sleepovers dressed in a prescribed uniform: black lycra bodysuit, black mini shorts, black knee-high socks. Hackneyed, but I don’t know how else to say it — like so many teenage girls, I was controlled by the engine of my insecurities, and I felt that if I could not be loved, let alone liked, I could at least be desired. And, too, like so many teenage girls, I was privy to constant inappropriate comments about my body, both negative and “positive,” both from peers and adults. I longed for a way to feel in control. Sometimes that was in what I drank and who I dated; but most of the time, it was in what I wore. At 14, the uniform — stuffed into my backpack and changed into after school — made me feel not powerful because I was sexy but sexy because I was powerful. At the time, I believed that the stares I got from others were envy, if not attraction. I felt rapturous when I could suck the air out of a room with just an outfit. It was not until I hit the crest of adulthood that I realized that these looks I got from others, particularly the adults in my life, were a kind of knowing — half-sympathy, half-drear, for a child in an adult’s body, so desperately trying to be loved. When I stared at the cheap outfits in the mall windows, I realized that while I didn’t covet them, the teenager in me did.
In January, Taylor wrote a phenomenal piece about attending a sex conference for women over 40 (aptly titled “Do These People Fuck?”). I could sense some connective tissue between these kinds of events — symposiums with talks on “Sex IQ” and “female Viagra” — with the sexy though not sensual garments hocked in store windows. Our sexual lives are frequently poxed by the language of youth: Get your life back. Feel like you’re 20 again. You’re only as old as you feel. This clothing, too, tells us it can render us young and desirable. And while “young” to a 50-year-old might mean 20, “young” to a 20-year-old might mean 16. What happens on, say, a Balenciaga runway, spills its runoff to Dolls Kill and Fashion Nova and the shopping mall stores. Its message is diluted at each port, simmered down for the age of its target audience. The 50-year-old shopping at TJ Maxx might not recognize the Balenciaga rip-off in a hot pink tube top but likes that it looks like the top they wore out clubbing in 2004. The 20-year-old shopping at Forever 21 might not recognize the Balenciaga rip-off in a lacy black bodysuit but likes that it looks like the Victoria’s Secret lingerie they shoplifted as a teenager. And so it goes, deeper and deeper, our sexual lives juiced by the mortification of age. You can make good money by telling women they’re running out of time.
I will say this — I don’t think that designers should be forced to geld their vision. You cannot control an audience’s proclivities, you may only respond to them, and a good designer both responds and guides them with a steady hand. I also think this cheap, sexy clothing I speak of (here’s a good example) is not actually, well, sexy. It’s low-grade, costumey, and, against its branding, not enfranchising in any way. To borrow another quote from Taylor:
“Our current culture is obsessed with empowerment. It’s a useful tool for justifying otherwise unnecessary or even harmful behaviors. It’s easy to say, for example, that splurging on new makeup is “empowering,” that it helps us feel good about ourselves and is therefore an act that combats the oppressive forces that have us down. In reality, the only ones who benefit from this line of thinking are the makeup companies themselves. It might be pleasurable, it might be fun, it might even make us feel more sexually appealing, but it does not, in fact, grant us power. It merely grants power back to the ideological forces that compel us to have these desires in the first place. “
I am not vouching for a tunic and a wimple for everybody, but I do feel the sexiest, as a grown woman, when I’m wearing clothing that I am both comfortable and vulnerable in — sensual clothing, passionate clothing. Buttery tops, tight and suggestive in their modesty; leather pants; high-neck halter dresses, with a back that begins at the small of my spine. Clothing that is a luxury to take off, ideally via the hands of another person. I could only figure that out for myself through getting older; I know just as many women who feel their sexiest in pajamas, oversized T-shirts, or archival Gaultier. The common denominator is that these clothes do not give us power but instead allow us to feel more at ease within our bodies and more confident enough to give into pleasure, which I don’t think many of the runway brands I mentioned, nor these mass-market brands, allow us anymore.
I’ve heard all of the cri de cœurs about “letting people enjoy things,” as well as what it means when women do in fact find validation and vigor from the Fashion Novas of the world. But is there not mystery in why, exactly, these dirt-cheap, sweatshop-made, three-pieces-of-cloth-on-a-string garments sell so well — or, on the other hand, nudge us toward disgust? We can talk about Balenciaga and Namilia all day, but what drives most of our fashion spending, at least in the U.S., is found not at designer boutiques but at the Belladonnas and City Classics in cities and flyover country alike. These garments are not well-crafted, sensual, interesting, or most of all good, but they clearly offer an easy solution. Whatever problem they’re trying to solve, I don’t know anymore — but I think 14-year-old me did.
To borrow another quote, from Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion:
“When I was a child, luxury was fur coats, evening dresses, and villas by the sea. Later on, I thought it meant leading the life of an intellectual. Now I feel that it is also being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman.”
See you on Friday. ꩜