At New York fashion week, the rise of boudoir chic – the art of dressing in luxe sleepwear in the daytime – showed no sign of abating. Gucci’s slipper shoe (the furry Princetown “sliced loaf”) was seen on the frow on the feet of Zoë Kravitz and Man Repeller’s Leandra Medine. Meanwhile, the silk pyjama top from spring/summer 2016 (seen in collections from Givenchy and Alexander Wang) was recently modelled by Margot Robbie on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and has made its way on to the high street.
The continued relevance of this trend has highlighted a bigger truth: that our rules about the clothes we wear has changed. Earlier this month, when the unwritten dress codes of the City of London were revealed (no brown shoes or ill-fitting suits and ties), they felt as if they existed in a different era. Indeed, the concept of the dress code has never felt more archaic and strange.
Partly, this is because both athleisure and, to a lesser extent, the utilitarian trend have absolutely altered the way we look at clothes. The idea of what is considered high fashion or “appropriate dressing” has been collapsed by the incorporation of elements such as the hoodie, the slider, the work shirt and the tracksuit jogger into catwalk collections. This intermingling of different looks and seasons (see the trans-seasonal jacket) has created an “anything is possible” attitude, while the rise of the merchandise pop-up shop has further muddied the waters. Is a price tag the only thing that separates a piece of everyday wear from a piece of haute couture? Kanye West attempted to articulate this change before his ill-fated Yeezy Season 4 collection: he stated that he would rather call his collection “apparel”, not fashion, as if the latter was an old-fashioned term for this current movement away from clothes that were more one-offs, made for the catwalk.
At New York fashion week, the retail-to-runway reality has begun (where you can go online and buy the items straight from the catwalk without seasonal delay), and shaken up the traditional fashion calendar. In wardrobe terms, this has opened up a new reality, a democratisation of looks and styles, where dressing as if you’ve just rolled out from under your duvet is the new normal.
