What's the point of all this "empowering" fashion?

This week, the fashion industry seems to have travelled back to 2016. Magazines have once again started using feminist language to describe the latest fashion shows, with seductive headlines and celebratory descriptions: «power dressing is back on the catwalk,» «the return of the girl-boss look,» «confidence, comfort and empowerment.» At the same time, the brands participating in Paris Fashion Week have issued press releases implying their clothes are rewriting «the archetypes of femininity,» and modernising women's wardrobes with subversive garments that convey "empowerment." The last time the fashion industry had happily exploited this term was during the year of Donald Trump's victory at the US presidential elections, when his infamous misogynistic, racist and anti-environmentalist statements had inspired designers and artists around the world to produce deliberately political collections. From the moment he entered the White House, catwalks began to teem with statement shirts - who could ever forget “We should all be feminists” - and 1970s looks, a decade synonymous with feminist liberation. Now that Anthony Vaccarello has designed vertiginous shoulder pads for Saint Laurent, Maria Grazia Chiuri has taken inspiration from the independent women of World War II for Dior, and Gabriela Hearst has narrated «the transformative good that happens when women are in charge» at Chloé, journalists and advertisers are back to writing about feminism, female solidarity and the importance of the right dress to be confident. But is there really any need for all this “empowering” fashion, if those who benefit from it are already “empowered”?

Chloé FW23

Chloé FW23

Saint Laurent FW23

Saint Laurent FW23

Givenchy FW23

Givenchy FW23

The reconciliation of feminism and femininity has introduced an infallible method of advertising into the industry: vanity as an act of self-empowerment. While it is true that every look can have a political aspect, and that every style choice can be a statement of one's ideological point of view, if all it takes to make a dress feminist is to describe it as such, then yes, those of Givenchy, Chloé and Saint Laurent were feminist fashion shows. But if we go beyond their glorifying reviews and redundant press releases, the consumerist nature of fashion reminds us that everything about politics is also about marketing. The democratisation of the arts brought about by social media, and the new activist and politically correct ideal of celebrities and the like, prove that post-feminist propaganda sells, especially when it is well-dressed, and ever since women have decided that the frivolous - heels, make-up and accessories - can fight the patriarchy, fashion has been rejoicing.

It should be noted that these Paris Fashion Week shows offer great originality. Drawing inspiration from different women, (Gabriela Hearst looked to Artemisa Gentileschi, Maria Grazia Chiuri to Catherine Dior), they distanced themselves from 1970s feminism,  an era from which many other designers had previously dredged up imagery, like Karl Lagerfeld, who replicated the protest posters of 1968 “bra-burning" activists for his Chanel Spring Summer 2015 collection. Needless to say, the models sent down the catwalk by the designers, both Lagerfeld in 2015 and Hearst and Chiuri this  past week, are conventionally beautiful, tall and thin, and almost all of them are white. And that the target audience for the collections, apart from social media, is primarily the buying public, namely a select group of privileged women who have already benefited from feminism, and are already "empowered." Using the feminist narrative, clothes are advertised as an excuse for guilt-free purchases, a mechanism that valorises a materialist success that relegates an entire ideological movement to looks alone, and not to professional or personal achievements, suggesting that women's success can only be measured by their looks: if you can buy the power-suit, you're good.

Chanel SS2015

Chanel SS2015

Dior SS2017

Dior SS2017

Some of these brands have taken part in the feminist movement with some targeted projects, such as Chloé's collaboration with UNICEF in 2021 to promote gender equality, or the LVMH executives’ commitment to increase female representation in top positions to 50%. Unfortunately, however, as long as a fashion show does not question the structures of its own system, as long as the intersectionality of modern feminism is not taken into account, any effort to make a fashion collection look radical will continue to fail. As historian and curator Nathalie Khan explains in her book Catwalk Politics, fashion «can reflect, but cannot renew, society.» Perhaps it's time to shelve the girl-boss and go back to making clothes for the women who will buy them, without making such a fuss.