Suits are conservative almost by definition these days. Women might wear them to staid offices or a job interview—maybe to brunch at the country club if that’s their lifestyle—and almost nowhere else.
But as spring collections came down the runways in recent weeks, some notable designers, including Miuccia Prada, seemed bent on upending this fusty, traditional cornerstone of the professional wardrobe. This season’s new suits for women have been pulled apart—sometimes literally—and reimagined.
In New York, Maxwell Osborne and Dao-Yi Chow focused their much-anticipated reboot of DKNY on Donna Karan’s ’90s-era, pinstripe suits. Double-breasted blazers were in abundance, but as Vogue’s review of the show pointed out, this ”riff on the power suit included exactly zero actual power suits.”
Instead, Osborne and Chow paired their big, boxy, masculine blazers with dresses and bottoms so short it looked like the models might have forgotten to put on their pants—not an office-ready look. Or the blazers were reconfigured into dresses themselves, some of which might actually be suitable for work.
Then there was Prada’s fantastic show in Milan. “Ms. Prada wanted to go back and think about suits, because we really don’t do them so much anymore,” Fabio Zambernardi, Prada’s design director, told reporters after the show. ”She became obsessed.”
The obsession resulted in demure skirt suits that recalled those Coco Chanel once pioneered. Only these were mostly remixed medleys of menswear fabrics—wooly plaids and tweeds in various colors, cut up and stitched back together, gleefully subverting their conservatism.
On Sept. 29, an off-kilter show by rising French label Jacquemus at Paris Fashion Week proposed what may be the kookiest take on suiting this season. Designer Simone Porte Jacquemus opened the collection with a menswear-inspired suit in a navy pinstripe. One jacket arm was replaced by that of a white dress shirt—that men’s officewear staple was a recurring motif.
A few looks later, half of a suit jacket came out over top of a sporty dress and t-shirt. Then, two halves of different jackets united in one dress. Another piece featured just the outline of a suit.
It was a dissection—”a patchwork of menswear and classic things,” Jacquemus told Tim Blanks at Business of Fashion, who dubbed it “‘Daddy the businessman’ taken apart on a CSI slab.”
Of course, menswear-inspired suits have always popped up here and there on women’s runways. They’re never far from Thom Browne’s mind, for instance. But lately, more than a few designers seem ready to reinvent the forgotten look. Perhaps they think it’s time the old-fashioned suit—and all the old conventions about a male-dominated workplace—got an update.