“It's become a bit cliched to talk about masculine/feminine now: Everyone's talking about it,” observed an endorphin-pumped Louise Trotter after this interesting overload of a show. “I wanted to play more with the role models of a male and a female,” she said. Almost uniquely, this is a subject upon which fashion can be more explicit than words, for clothes are our most potent codifiers of gender.
But let’s try and keep up. We started with classically-for-Joseph neutral menswear-touched womenswear: Monochrome T-shirts, skirts, and sweats both held together and defined by twist and turn. There were plenty of unexpected rips and twists, whorls of construction. There were bengal stripe versus pencil stripe viscose silk shirtdresses and skirts, plus the odd drop of conventional feminized suiting teamed with sheer tailored men’s shirts with girlishly ribboned cuffs. Then a shot of acid yellow and patent shine black leather signaled what Trotter saw as a break phase in the narrative from girl dressed as boy to—and please bear with me here—girl dressed as boy dressed like girl.
This allowed Trotter to blend pretty, gleaming vintage brocades into monkish, military-touched pieces trailed by nylon webbing—this second movement’s equivalent to the knots and bows we’d just seen in the first. Her expression of this mood became less gilded and more repressed—you know, manly—until a last look that took us back, near full-circle, to the first. To see some of the still-shifting ground Trotter was attempting to survey here, see the Fall collections from Gucci or Craig Green. As an overview—and a point of view—this Joseph collection was both dizzying and fascinating.
