What do we mean when we say “sexy” – Weekend – Kommersant
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Fashion has always been one way or another connected with what is commonly called the word “sexy”. One of the most important achievements of the fashion revolution that has taken place in recent years is the acquisition of a new sexual freedom. The freedom to express your sexuality however you like, or not to express it at all. And certainly freedom from having to express it in a prescribed way.
“The fact that you are forced to be a doll, always the same, in order to be beautiful is simply bad, it is unworthy of women. That’s why I hate everything that people think makes a woman beautiful. I am fundamentally against this, from a personal and universal point of view. I am also against it because it is banal. I want to be smarter, more complex, more sophisticated, more interesting, newer,” said Miuccia Prada in an interview with The Independent about eight years ago. Actually, this “to be a doll” is the essence of the so-called sexy, as it was commonly understood in the patriarchal, traditional culture, of which it is the most important part. And Miuccia Prada is one of those fashion designers who systematically destroyed it and achieved notable success in this.
Over the past seven or eight years, many texts have been written, including by me, praising the fashion revolution and its fruits and giving them names – “gender ambivalence”, “new femininity” and even “new fashion”. The essence of all these arguments boiled down to one thing: the most important thing that this very fashion has won for us, the most important thing that it has brought, and in general its defining property is inclusiveness. If before fashion was for the young, tall, slender and preferably beautiful, now it is for everyone. Not in the sense that designer items became available to everyone, but in the sense that fashion designers began to make things in which any figure and any age look fashionable, and, moreover, they began to show these things on models of different shapes and different ages. . And we are not talking about ritual statements and plus-size models ritually released on the podium by those brands that preach quite conventional beauty for a completely standard model body. Haider Ackermann spoke very accurately on this topic in our interview, saying that you can’t call yourself feminists and make dresses with a tight waist and thin spaghetti straps, in which few 50-year-old women can feel comfortable. It’s about presenting a new physicality in the space of fashion – and therefore, a new beauty, and a new sexuality.
All post-war fashion, no matter how the decades changed, claimed only one silhouette as fashionable, and, accordingly, sexuality was also the same for everyone – both were described by the traditional triad “chest-waist-hips”. Even if fashion, as in the 60s, ceased to emphasize one of the three, the absence was still emphasizing. The real destruction of this canon did not even begin with the fact that the Japanese came with their flat cut, and then the Belgians with their deconstruction, but from the fact that somewhere in the mid-80s, in the era of power women, aerobics and brave supermodels, inside fashion, within the circle of people involved in it, a desire arises and grows stronger to somehow alienate all this cheerful athletic beauty, all these laid curls and high busts. They wanted to achieve a shift, strangeness, destroy the emasculation and start some other mechanisms. Such a desire leads to the fact that all these people, from Yoji Yamamoto and Martin Margiela to Gilles Sander and Miuccia Prada, stop opening and fitting the female body, and instead begin to close it and create a protective cover around it. Clothing ceases to be an instrument of seduction – both direct and indirect, stereotypes – femininity, beauty and sexuality – become the subject of turning, mixing and turning inside out. And deconstructions, of course.
Prada’s orphan dresses and her baggy suits, Yamamoto’s tight-fitting, intricate black outfits, Margiela’s poetic oversize, turned and recut, deformed, with growths, humps and bumps, the silhouettes of Rei Kawakubo – each of them had their own ways of deconstruction. But all of them repelled from “seductive curves” and other clichés, emphasizing, grotesquely sharpening, oddities and imperfections, showing that in difference, in non-standard, in breaking out from the general series, there is beauty, that strange, unformatted and devoid of any gloss can be much sexier than perfect, because it sharpens the senses, makes the intellect and imagination work. Through their efforts, beauty in the form in which all post-war fashion understood it, conventional beauty, ceased to be fashionable. Ideality has fallen into disrepair – with the glory of high heels and twisted curls.
The new fashion began with the blurring of gender roles and standards. From the asexuality of Alessandro Michele and his boys and girls in the same clothes, often women’s, and indistinguishable from each other, when the definition of “sexy” did not even arise next to this phenomenon. From the grotesque hyper-volumes and layering of Demna Gvasalia, whose men and women of different ages, but equally non-glossy, deliberately ordinary and in fact exceptionally extraordinary for fashion appearance, were dressed in almost identical suits, robes, parkas. From the unwinding of all codes and styles by Raf Simons and the subsequent unwinding of combinations that are captivating in their unpredictability from their different parts. And of course, with the new femininity of Phoebe Philo, with her triumph of peace and will, infinitely luxurious and free beauty, refusing to expose herself and somehow objectify.
Huge sweaters, heavy coats, men’s jackets that are three sizes too large and rough shoes have long been commonplace, endlessly reproducible mass market, and mini and crop tops have not disappeared from the catwalk. But Prada’s tiny skirts and bare torsos, as well as Gvasalia’s spandex jumpsuits that literally fit from head to toe, these old clichés of “sexy”, have completely ceased to be perceived as something designed to seduce and lure. Because they have been so radically recontextualized, so divorced from sexualization and objectification, that they can no longer be described in the same categories. How impossible to describe in the old categories and sexuality.
Eight years ago, in connection with the emergence of a new fashion wave, I wrote that women do not want to be hot, but they want to be cool – today I would say that this “hot” itself has ceased to look familiar. And if I began to explain what this current “hot” is, I would use the words “strangeness”, “vulnerability”, “mockery” and even, probably, “anxiety”, even it can be included in the concept of “hot” of one from the components. But the main thing is the lack of visible effort, effort and desire to comply, which is the most unsexy thing in the world.
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