Women who dress women and take advantage of their designs to send messages at New York Fashion Week

A dress can be something political (in fact it is in most cases), but fashion as a creative proposal is not obliged to position itself, it would be necessary.

It is striking, however, that the biggest demands of New York fashion week have coincided these days on catwalks by brands run by women.

Or maybe not so much.

While the parades took place throughout the city, in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum, in its Costume Institute, they announced that they would extend the temporary exhibition

Women Dressing Women

for several weeks .

An exhibition that remembers how what is understood today as the North American fashion industry was founded on the work of many creators.

Some famous, most anonymous or forgotten.

A historical review that seems to challenge from the gallery rooms the reality of a calendar in which they are a minority.

It is not something exclusive to New York, the case is repeated throughout the luxury market, but the setback in this field is still symbolic as it coincides in time with a reactionary boom.

Just as in the past women opted for radically modern ways of dressing, the designers of New York Fashion Week dialogue with the present based on their different realities.

The temporary exhibition at the Metropolitan served precisely as a starting point for Hillary Taymour, the designer of Collina Strada, to create a collection that glorified feminine power.

“Welcome to the Collina Gym, where your inner feminine power is chiseled outwardly,” was the message of the press release that she received to guests in a Rockefeller Center basement.

With projections that recreated her

glitchcore references,

and based on explosions of color, the designer managed to recreate the atmosphere of modern temples of body worship, but with a completely different energy: “The female mind and body have always been modeled by the imagination of men,” he continued, “it is time for us to resculpt that vision that thinks of the flesh, to make way for something closer to the reality of femininity.”

One that is above all robust and diverse: muscular bodies that have rarely been seen on a female catwalk,

queer bodies,

pregnant bodies, disabled bodies or voluminous bodies that are an example, once again, of what it means to adopt diversity out of conviction. and not by fee.

About them?

Light dresses that did not hide them, but rather celebrated them;

tops

that recreated the silhouette of an armor, but based on soft and fluffy silk microruffles;

shiny T-shirts, as if they had been dipped in oil, or sweatshirts with protective elbow pads.

More information

Authentic looks, popular visions and many identifying labels at New York fashion week

Some members of the particular gym of Hillary Taymour's proposal for the Collina Strada firm.Getty Images

Sandy Liang’s collection was dedicated to “a schoolgirl who grows up to become a princess.”

The New York designer, who matured in her parents' restaurant in Chinatown, understands a lot about dreams and desires.

She also knows where the weight of the industry lies: her grandmother, who emigrated from China in the middle of the last century, was one of the many seamstresses who at that time worked for less than the minimum wage in the Garment District of Manhattan, the area that It concentrated the majority of workshops.

Liang's atelier today is

in

the neighborhood where she spent her childhood, where she also has her store.

Her brand celebrates its first decade in top form, with an eclectic proposal that draws on the aesthetics of

Sailor Moon

and her Chinese heritage.

In fact, some of her accessories could have come from the closet of that grandmother who landed in New York in the sixties.

Kitsch

or corniness are not a weakness for Liang, but rather an opportunity to reappropriate an entire narrative that for a long time was reviled by the canonical story

.

Tracksuits with flowers in the same fabric, ballerina shoes, flared skirts that both women and men wear or suits that hide bows in the back.

There's a reason Liang is one of the favorite names among coquettecore followers

.

Three of Sandy Liang's proposals: princesses and schoolgirls.

Tory Burch is an admirer of Claire McCardell, one of the few American designers to receive credit in the past and one of the protagonists of the show at the Met.

She is credited with being the creator, or at least a very good ambassador, of American

sportswear

and having drawn up the guidelines for a style that Burch now covers.

Her brand turns 20, rejuvenated with several collections already laying the foundations for a new, fresher hallmark.

Last Monday night's parade, at the Public Library in Bryant Park, was a celebration of the path she has been blazing in recent years, this time playing with volumes and silhouettes.

Trapeze dresses or geometric skirts constructed the way bags are constructed: “The architectural forms are engineered from the inside out, an approach used in the making of the bags.”

Patterns that not only do not follow the lines of the body, but confront them by creating safety zones around them, pants with front darts that shoot forward, polished jackets and color combinations that lay the foundations for where that style can advance. easy American that McCardell defended 80 years ago.

In his new collection presented on Monday in New York Tory Burch advances in his process of redefining what American sportswear is today.Getty Images

Gabriela Hearst's show rivaled New York's first snowstorm in more than two years.

But the audience managed to reach the warehouse in the Brooklyn port where the Uruguayan began the parade with several coats that looked especially desirable in the low temperatures.

While many of the week's guests have recovered their fur coats (the reactionary movement is also felt in the closet), Hearst played trompe-l'oeil with pieces that looked like animal skin, but that, in reality, were made of cashmere woven in various ways.

There was also what looked like a cowboy, in a double-breasted trench coat like a dressing gown and in pants for men and women, but which was actually a fabric made from recycled cotton and hemp.

Wool that looked like astrakhan or leather patterned as if it were a much lighter fabric.

Her palette comes directly from Leonora Carrington's mural

The Magical World of the Mayans,

a work that landed in Madrid precisely a year ago at the first retrospective on the surrealist painter's work.

“She was a visionary: she saw both the future and other worlds around us,” wrote the designer, who she came out to greet with a red Save the Children cap.

“Much of what concerns us today already concerned her in 1940. Feminism, environmentalism, spirituality outside of organized religions, nature's ability to heal us and, especially, the interconnectedness of all of this.”

Textile trompe l'oeil in Gabriela Hearst's new collection.Getty Images

Disputed Gender,

Judith Butler's canonical book that noted that gender is a social construct, was the spark of inspiration for Ulla Johnson's new collection.

The Brooklyn designer introduced for the first time five male models among her outings, dressed in the intense colors and delicate cuts that are usually common in her collections.

But the subversion of it was not there.

Her work revolved around elements that are considered traditionally feminine, but with a different perspective from Liang's.

In front of an imposing

crochet

sculpture by Abby Cheney, Johnson played with shoulder pads, cinched waists or ruffles, which she shed with sentimentality by, for example, overloading a dress with nine rows of them.

Openwork, embroidery or handmade

crochet

dresses put her manual stamp on the whole.

Games of color were protagonists on the Ulla Johnson catwalk.Getty Images

While live music by Loren Kramar, Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta played, the creatives at Eckhaus Latta presented a collection last Friday that reviewed the key points of their style.

Games of proportions and textures under a concise palette, but without losing sight of a very particular sexy point that the duo embroiders.

There was no shortage of nods to the more utilitarian aesthetic that reinterprets the American style, seeking inspiration from the workers on whom the chimera of the American dream is built.

Big boots that could almost be mistaken for factory safety footwear, comforting coats with artificial fur, very low-rise pants for them and a lot of jeans.

The parade on the heights of Eckhaus Latta.Getty images

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