Looking for on-trend and affordable bridal lingerie? Boy, do we have the solution for you. On Monday, in a move so sly, we very nearly missed it, Zara posted about a new bridal slip dress on Twitter, part of the brand’s first-ever bridal lingerie collection. The Spanish brand’s first foray into wedding-wear includes a full selection of wedding-ready bras and panties, silk robes, slips, shoes, and more.
In the just-launched collection — which is just as worthy of a purchase for brides as it is for non-brides (coming from a non-bride who just bought this mini slip dress) — Zara compiled just about every sartorial item a bride-to-be could need for their big day, apart from their actual wedding look (that is, unless you want to wear a nightgown on your wedding day, which is actually a huge trend this year). There are babouche-style slides, sheer bra-panty sets, statement headbands, PJ sets, and a total of six slip dresses. To avoid emergency spills before the wedding night, the collection also includes a protective dress bag and clutch.
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LONDON, ENGLAND – JULY 11: (BILD ZEITUNG OUT) . ,Catherine,Duchess of Cambridge and Prinz William,Duke of Cambridge prior to the UEFA Euro 2020 Championship Final between Italy and England at Wembley Stadium on July 11, 2021 in London, United Kingdom. (Photo by Matteo Ciambelli/DeFodi Images via Getty Images)
Middleton has long been a sports fan. From attending Wimbledon annually to challenging Prince William and Prince Harry at the 100-meter sprint, the Duchess of Cambridge knows a good match. And, of course, how to dress for it.
On Sunday, Middleton accompanied her husband, the Duke of Cambridge, to the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship final, between England and Italy, donning a white blazer and black slacks. She accessorized with red beaded earrings, adding a bold touch to the otherwise-casual look. The statement earrings, from London-based retailer Blaiz, are not only still available but they are also fairly affordable (at least compared to the designer looks Middleton often sports), retailing for $92.
This wasn’t Middleton’s only sporting outing of the day. Earlier on Sunday, Middleton attended a Wimbledon match in a soft pink dress with a belt by London-based brand Beulah, paired with her staple floral-print mask. Pink has been favorite of Middleton as of late She donned a fuschia Alexander McQueen dress to meet First Lady Jill Biden in June.
LONDON, ENGLAND – JULY 11: HRH Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge attends Wimbledon Championships Tennis Tournament at All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club on July 11, 2021 in London, England. (Photo by Karwai Tang/WireImage)
Middleton has long maintained a tradition of wearing dresses and blazer-and-pants combos to sporting events, like the green dress she sported to attend Wimbledon in 2019 alongside Meghan Markle. But recently the Duchess has also stepped up her sporty styles. In May, she donned a tenniscore look with a Polo Ralph Lauren knit sweater and Superga sneakers. Later, in June, she donned a pair of & Other Stories jeans, swapping her classic skinny look for a relaxed, straight-leg shape.
If you want to take a page out of Middleton’s book, you can shop her exact earrings below.
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NEW YORK, NY – JULY 10: Rihanna (L) and A$AP Rocky are seen filming a music video in the Bronx on July 10, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by Raymond Hall/GC Images)
Hot girl summer is well underway, but Rihanna’s latest looks are already giving us a sneak peek at hot girl fall. Despite the simmering New York heat this weekend, the “Love On The Brain” singer stepped out to work on an upcoming music video (no word yet on whose video it is!) with boyfriend A$AP Rocky, donning a cold weather-ready outfit.
On Saturday, she was spotted wearing a brown corset-and-pants combo with a matching full-length shearling coat. Appearing immune to the heat, she accessorized the look with a gold necklace and a yellow silk headscarf. On Sunday, the beauty mogul was seen again filming, this time in a Louis Vuitton Spring 2022 hot pink fuzzy jacket, paired with denim shorts and a neon green strapless top with matching platform sandals.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JULY 11: Rihanna seen on the set of her music video in the Bronx on July 11, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by James Devaney/GC Images)
The weekend-long fashion show is the singer’s latest serve of ‘90s and Y2K-inspired outfits, which has included a streak of archival fashion. Her latest take on the ‘90s fuzzy trend is taking us back to June 23, when she donned a hot pink hat, paired with a Dior slip dress from 2002 and gold heeled sandals from Tom Ford.
The singer has also taken to lingerie and bustiers lately. On July 5, she stepped out in New York City wearing a teddy dress from NYC-based label Vaquera, paired with an exposed lace bra and pearl necklaces. It was very on-trend: Exposed lingerie, including whale tails, is one of the biggest early-aughts trends dominating this summer season.
If your summer wardrobe is still missing the Regencycore bustier-corset trend Rihanna’s championed lately, take a look at some ideas, below.
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Sadly, it’ll be a while before we find out. According to BoF, Philo has not yet released a date for her first collection, though she has revealed that more information will be shared in January 2022.
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After 16 months of sitting mostly empty, offices in the U.S. are preparing to re-open their doors to employees. But, while corporate spaces have always been ruled by dress codes, a pandemic year at home will throw those strictures out the window. What will happen when workwear enters uncharted territory?
“I think workplaces are going to have to recalibrate and start to negotiate with their employees in a way that they never really had to before,” says Deirdre Clemente, a fashion historian and associate professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “It’s going to be a very interesting time to see how these two groups [employers and workers] negotiate what is appropriate and not appropriate.”
Since March 2020, the standard dress code for people working from home has been casual — at best. The last time many workers set foot in an office was March 2020, and since then, working days have been full of activewear, T-shirts, and house dresses. Although many experts have recommended keeping up with daily routines, including getting dressed, one meeting is enough to make anyone want to switch a button-down for last night’s pajamas. Although it may seem like the post-vaccine landscape has ditched sweatpants for party dresses, the reality is many are not ready to give up the comfort of working from home — even if they’re not working from home.
Historically, office dress codes once played a pivotal role in the work environment, particularly for women. Since the early 20th century, when they joined the workforce in earnest, the way women dressed in the office has largely been dictated by the male gaze, according to Clemente, from the skirt length to the undergarments. “You were putting on these clothes and going into an environment that’s regulated by men, enforced often by women, because the women often reported to the head secretary,” says Clemente. “So you have women enforcing male standards of dress on other women.”
By the 1950s and 1960s, the unspoken rules became actual office policy, amid a time of political and social upheaval that had people questioning social norms and institutions. “You can’t really have the rise of written-down dress codes until you start to see people pushing back on what’s appropriate,” says Clemente. In the 1970s and 1980s, when women were taking the corporate world by storm, designers and brands like Anne Klein, Ann Taylor, and Donna Karan were servicing their needs with separates, rather than suits, to help women embrace their style while adhering to office policy and social norms. “It’s the versatility that had been coming for decades in other facets of our dress,” says Clemente.
Today, we are also pushing back on standards, perhaps even more than mid-century society. From gender norms and pay inequity to the 9-to-5 workday, people are fighting for offices to be more flexible as they shift out of working from home. “Dress codes are becoming an antiquated way of the past, similar to the increasing irrelevance of the standard 40-hour workweek,” says Katherine Watts, Vice President of Women’s at StitchFix, a personal styling service. “As the workforce engages in more flexibility, so, too, should employers and how they think about dictating dress codes.”
Before the pandemic, industry “disruptors” were already pushing the boundaries of work dress. Startups and their leaders ditched suit-and-ties for Hanes T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers. Even corporate America was attempting to embrace more casual workwear. In 2019, Goldman Sachs sent an internal memo announcing the time was right “to move to firmwide flexible dress code” while urging its 36,000 employees to “exercise good judgment in this regard.” While the memo left a lot of room for interpretation, it still signaled a way out of the suits and pumps into business casual.
This new mindset will undoubtedly influence how retailers and brands approach workwear in the future.
For Lisa Sun, CEO of clothing label Gravitas, versatility is the future of workwear. She says the new office closet will be divided into two categories. First, she envisions women going back to the office in clothes that might not have passed muster at the office in pre-times, including athleisure pieces like sweatpants, tank tops, and T-shirt dresses. The other category of clothing we can expect to see more of are pieces that play into the desire of vaccinated Americans to finally dress up again. She says this part of the closet will be reserved for conferences, meetings, and events, but will still be an essential part of workwear as it becomes synonymous with celebration and special occasions.
“This transition will happen more as people fully go back to the office in the fall,” she says, adding that her customers are reaching for styles like the Elizabeth Top and Berta Jogger combo, which allow women to mix and match with other formal pieces to transition their look from Zoom to the conference room. “For now, you are still going with your athleisure and throwing on an old blazer.”
Our shopping habits bear out what Watts calls an “excitement for newness and dressing up again while maintaining comfortability.” She shares that there’s been a 60% uptick over the past year in requests for pieces like rompers and jumpsuits, while leggings and loungewear are down 55% and 60%, respectively. StitchFix is categorizing the new workwear as “business comfort.” “We expect to see workwear styles that are traditionally more form-fitting, like blazers and denim, to have more stretch post-pandemic, and even a looser fit,” says Watts.
Still, Clemente points out that it’s not going to be all elastic waistbands and cotton tunics. There will be pushback against this new loosened standard, and people will assert their individuality by coming to work in the spiffy looks of yesteryear. This time, in other words, it’s the rebels who will be wearing the designer suit.
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The Pyer Moss Fall 2021 Couture show made headlines before it even began. On Thursday, members of the press, friends of the New York-based brand, and celebrity fans like Black-ish’s Tracee Ellis Ross, stylist Law Roach, and model-activist Bethann Hardison made the 90-minute trip from New York City to the fashion show’s venue where, after three false starts due to Tropical Storm Elsa, it was announced that the show would be postponed to Saturday. Though this type of upheaval is a rare occurrence in fashion, an industry that often resists change and disruption, it was one that many embraced for a chance to see Pyer Moss designer Kerby Jean-Raymond‘s debut couture collection.
Even prior to Thursday, the buzz around this show was at an all-time high. Not only did the showcase mark Jean-Raymond‘s first couture collection for Pyer Moss and first runway show in almost two years, but it also awarded him the honor of becoming the first Black American designer to be invited to participate as part of Paris Couture Fashion Week calendar by the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. The designer didn’t take this historical moment lightly.
The event took place far away from Paris’ runway haunts — at Villa Lewaro in Irvington, New York, the estate of the late Madam C.J. Walker, the Black beauty entrepreneur who became America’s first female self-made millionaire. Elaine Brown, the former chairman of the Black Panther Party, opened the show with a powerful speech about liberation, then 22Gz, a rapper from Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood where Jean-Raymond grew up, took the stage for a performance that would soundtrack the catwalk. Next came the looks, each one a nod to an invention created by a Black entrepreneur, culminating in a model wearing a ruffled mini-dress covered by a refrigerator adorned with magnets reading: “But who invented Black trauma?”
PYER MOSS COUTURE 1
PYER MOSS COUTURE 1
It was a resonant, but fitting question for the finale of a collection by a brand whose show notes read: “We are an invention inside of an invention. Inside of the creation of race, we made blackness. Uprooted from home and put in a foreign land, we made culture. And when they tried to strip our humanity, we made freedom so tethered to each other that it still shapes the world today… Black imagination is this world’s greatest technology.”
While it’s rare that designers, particularly ones of haute couture variety, sew that much meaning into their clothes, this isn’t the first time the CFDA Fashion Award-winning designer has addressed race in a Pyer Moss collection. Jean-Raymond‘s last runway show in 2019 marked the conclusion of a three-part series titled “American, Also.” that explored what it means to be Black in America. Its reception was full of acclaim — a career highlight that may have only been eclipsed by Vice President Kamala Harris wearing a Pyer Moss design the day before Inauguration Day.
Although fashion rarely delves into conversations on race (and is, in fact, often criticized for instances of appropriation and insensitivity), Pyer Moss has long tackled nuanced topics by presenting them wrapped in elegantly wrapped fabrics, bold colors, and voluminous silhouettes. In line with shows presented during Haute Couture Fashion Week, the “Wat U Iz” collection doubled down on the volume and drama with oversized ice cream cone-patterned chaps, a bottle cap-shaped skirt, a peanut butter jar art piece-turned-dress, and a Super Soaker-inspired blazer.
PYER MOSS COUTURE 1
PYER MOSS COUTURE 1
The over-the-top looks may initially bring to mind Moschino’s campiest collections. But whereas Moschino’s Jeremy Scott finds humor in poking fun at fashion, a notoriously serious industry, with this collection, Jean-Raymond is redefining what couture is and could be, by giving prime placement to iconic objects created by Black individuals, and recontextualizing what it means to give credit where credit is due. The effect makes show-viewers wonder whether household items like a folding chair and an old-school cell phone are part of the look or just props (fine, there’s some Moschino-level trolling on Jean-Raymond’s part), and why it is we take some things seriously, and others for granted. While it stands on its own, this trailblazing collection arrives two months before Met Gala’s “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” exhibit which promises to engage with conversations about who gets to create fashion in America and who has been excluded from the narrative. (Pyer Moss is one of the brands that will be featured in the exhibit.)
PYER MOSS COUTURE 1
PYER MOSS COUTURE 1
The surreal looks were juxtaposed with more “wearable” pieces — a baby blue gown with side cutouts and a Marie Antoinette-esque skirt (or, at least, the Sofia Coppola version of one), a gold sequin mini, and a white suit that would look great on the red carpet on the likes of Ross or Roach’s most famous client, Zendaya. Personally, I would love to see a celebrity wear the impossibly beautiful ruched pink dress with a Swarovski-crystal embellished lampshade hat that could even rival Billy Porter’s 2020 Grammys look.
While many might connect the surreality of the collection with the revelation that Jean-Raymond came up with it while doing ayahuasca, that would be missing the point. Instead, what matters about Pyer Moss’ latest is the thrilling way in which it exemplifies why the inherently elitist art form that is haute couture is still meaningful for those who can’t afford to buy any of its pieces: It creates a fantasy. But unlike fantasies expressed on the runways of Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week regulars like Chanel and Balenciaga — brides entering on horseback, royal-appropriate gowns, etc. — Jean-Raymond’s fantasy world is one that is both eminently possible and yet all too frequently out of reach: one where Black people are finally given the proper recognition for their many essential contributions to all our lives.
Ahead, see the new collection in full (the show starts at the 32-minute mark).
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NEW YORK – JULY 22: Blake Lively on location for “Gossip Girl” on the streets of Manhattan on July 22, 2009 in New York City. (Photo by James Devaney/WireImage)
Sophomore year of high school, two weeks before the homecoming dance, I went to the Guess store at my local mall, in a southwest suburb of Chicago. I needed a dress stat, and I couldn’t afford one that I really wanted: a cream-colored ruffled mini from BCBG. Inside the store, which was nestled between Gap and Chico’s, a navy blue bandage dress — similar to ones worn by Cindy Crawford and Salma Hayek in the ‘90s and Lindsay Lohan and Blake Lively (on the set of the OG Gossip Girl, no less) in the ‘00s — hung on a wall display. I snatched it before some other 15-year-old on a mission (and a limited budget) could and walked tall all the way to the dressing room.
As soon as I’d maneuvered the micro-mini over my body, I knew something was wrong. Not only could I not move or breathe in the sartorial torture device, but I also couldn’t take it off. I spent the next 45 minutes panicking, convincing myself that the only way I could get out of this dress was by hacking the skin-tight bodycon off with whatever sharp item I could find in my backpack. By the time I did pry it off, I was drained. I abandoned shopping for a dress altogether, and ended up re-wearing a beaded Free People dress from the clearance section at Lord & Taylor.
Salma Hayek at the Mann Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, California (Photo by Steve Granitz/WireImage)
Rihanna during 2007 Clive Davis Pre-GRAMMY Awards Party – Arrivals at Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, United States. (Photo by Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic)
I swore to never subject myself to the dangers of a bandage. Frankly, I thought I’d never have to, with the trend dwindling in popularity by the early 2010s.
She also believes that consumers are using tight clothing, like bandage dresses, as a way of taking back control following a year when very little was up to us. “Fitted fashion gives people a sense of control,” she says. “This is due to the close feeling of the clothes to the body which creates some restriction, and therefore, more control in your body movements. Now that we are going out into the world post-pandemic, [people are craving those boundaries.]”
Then there is the general increase in interest in Y2K fashion, especially among Gen Z’ers on TikTok who are just discovering style staples from the era. Given the bandage dress’ place in the ’00s, as the ultimate party and red-carpet look, it’s no wonder they’re coming back now.
As for me? Well, if I’m going to step into a bandage dress in 2021, it damn well better have a zipper.
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