I mean, few things are as validating as when another woman compliments your look, right?
Today, our most recent sartorial strides is certainly the influence of streetwear as a scope for dressing that exists beyond gendered notions and expectations. Streetwear titans like Supreme and Palace were once strictly for the boys, but like all good things in a world hopefully striving for progress; streetwear is now fully the domain of women, too. Hoodies, sneakers, and oversized silhouettes—once considered hyper-masculine and reserved for the skater boyfriends and brothers around us—are now entirely mainstream in womenswear. The idea of ‘flattering’ is a concept we must each reconcile with for ourselves; and this shift away from body-conscious dressing speaks to the deliberative abandonment of fashion in relation to the way women’s bodies have been historically controlled, commodified, and scrutinised. The only rules today are that there are no rules— and to dress for oneself might feel like a simple no-brainer today; but it is a hard-won expression of our place in the world as women.
Fashion as a form of expression finds itself most distilled when it speaks to self-ownership and breaking barriers on our own terms. As always, I think a short fashion history reminder will help contextualise just how recent it is that the idea of intermixing masculine and feminine notions of dressing: leading ultimately to where we are today, in which these ideals are becoming largely irrelevant.
For most of fashion history, the boundaries between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ dress were rigidly enforced, with women’s clothing designed to emphasise submission and modesty. Even as late as the 1960s, women in many professions were barred from wearing pants to work, a restriction that only began to shift with second-wave feminism. The idea of blending masculine and feminine elements in everyday dress is a remarkably recent freedom.
Today, however, the integration of these aesthetics has progressed towards a more fluid self-expression. Women can wear deconstructed suits with delicate tulle, or a structured corset with oversized trousers, without making a political statement—simply because she wants to. This shift reaches beyond borrowing from menswear, toward dissolving the strict binaries that once governed fashion. The ability to mix and match these elements at will is a strikingly modern privilege—one that reflects how far we have come in reclaiming style as an extension of personal agency rather than conforming to any kind of societal expectations.
Yves Saint Laurent’s infamous Le Smoking tuxedo in 1966 marked a turning point in the history of womenswear. No longer a mere experiment, the suit was now positioned as aspirational womenswear—all at once sophisticated and undeniably sensual. Saint Laurent’s design was groundbreaking in both its aesthetic and in its implications; it gave women a way to command attention and assert authority in a world that still expected them to dress for the male gaze. As the late 1970s approached, the idea of women in suits gained momentum. Feminism’s second wave had encouraged women to reclaim autonomy over their bodies, their careers, and their wardrobes. Fashion followed suit, quite literally. Tailored blazers, high-waisted trousers, and sleek, structured silhouettes became symbols of independence, setting the stage for the power-dressing phenomenon that would define the next decade; the power suit era of the 1980s. As my mom will attest to, nothing was more as utterly self-empowering than donning shoulder pads that commanded presence.
The 1980s marked a radical departure from previous decades. As more women entered boardrooms, particularly in politics and executive roles, the suit became their armour of choice. This era of power dressing was defined by structured blazers, exaggerated shoulder pads, and sharp lapels—an aesthetic that borrowed heavily from traditional menswear but infused it with an assertive, almost aggressive femininity. The aim was clear: to be taken seriously in a male-dominated world, one had to look the part.
Possibly my favourite era of fashion, and where we begin to see womenswear actively depart from extracting its assertion through menswear, the 1990s ushered in a pared back revolution in women’s fashion. With the excess of the 1980s behind them, designers began to strip clothing down to its essentials. German designer Jil Sander’s evocation of a strict minimalism, championed by precision tailoring and an almost austere aesthetic, was her attempt at redefining femininity through simplicity rather than embellishment. For Jil, women were not dolls destined to be overly adorned and paraded around for a performance of fashion, and she’s quoted as saying that “I felt that it was much more attractive to cut clothes with respect for the living, three-dimensional body rather than to cover the body with decorative ideas.”
Meanwhile, Miuccia Prada introduced an intellectual, anti-glamour approach to fashion, embracing ‘ugly chic’ as a founding principle for Prada’s cult-like ascension in fashion during the 1990s. Paving the way for androgyny as a central theme in womenswear, and rejecting the traditionally ‘beautiful’ and overtly seductive, Prada instead found allure in the offbeat, the subversive, and the intellectual; creating a new kind of luxury that was less about status and more about nuance. This ethos was crystallised in her Autumn/Winter 1996 collection, famously dubbed Banal Eccentricity, which challenged the very notion of what was considered desirable at the time.
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