Bubble skirts are the bottoms to have on your radar this fall.
The voluminous, hyperfeminine style that dominated summer is no fleeting trend: Its hold on fashion continues into the colder months, proving it’s more versatile than you might think.
We know bubble skirts have staying power — they’ve been a statement piece since the ‘80s, when Vivienne Westwood’s punk puffballs and Christian Lacroix’s extravagant, layered skirts were party wear staples. They’re still fun and festive but can also be styled down for more casual activities. Fall calls for a bubble skirt on top of jeans or trousers to channel that Y2K aesthetic, with tights or thermal leggings for extra warmth, or with a matching top for a co-ordinated look. Style with sneakers, heels, or knee-high boots and don’t be afraid to experiment with color and pattern, too.
Ready to find the right bubble skirt for you? Ahead, find 18 styles you can shop now.
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Ghospell Vanessa Midi Bubble Skirt, $, available at Ghospell
The Brazilian label known for its tropical prints and happiness-inducing colorways has actually been working with the iconic sportswear brand since 2014. (It’s one of the latter’s longest running partnerships, alongside other big names like Stella McCartney and Yohji Yamamoto.) This capsule marks the 10-year milestone by injecting Adidas Original streetwear and Farm Rio favorite silhouettes with vibrant hues and patterns that’ll brighten up these fall days.
Expect floral and animal print Firebird jackets, palm tree-embroidered logo hoodies, and accessories including backpacks, caps and a printed altinha ball, from the popular Brazilian sport of the same name.
“The partnership between Adidas and FARM Rio has endured for so long because it is a true fusion of creative forces that complement each other in extraordinary ways,” said Farm Rio’s head designer, Daniela Moritz, in a statement, crediting the pair’s “perfect balance between street attitude and contagious joy”.
Shop the Adidas x Farm Rio collection from 10th October at 10am EST.
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If you’ve ever stood in front of your wardrobe and thought, I have nothing to wear, Net-A-Porter’s fashion director Kay Barron has some advice for you. Her new book, How To Wear Everything, is a no-nonsense guide to dressing, designed to help us worry less about our clothes. Filled with her practical and professional tips alongside advice from people like Sofia Richie Grainge, Law Roach, and Sarah Jessica Parker (no big deal), Barron’s book is helping us to connect with our personal style.
The idea for the book came six years ago: She wanted it to be a “bible” for getting dressed. “Clothes should never be intimidating, they should always make you feel good about yourself,” she tells Refinery29. “I wanted everyone to understand what they want to wear, how they want to wear it and where they want to wear it.” In the book, Barron shares item-by-item tips for every kind of occasion, from heading to the office to going on a first date (which obviously differs from the second and third one). “The thing to remember about making use of everything in your wardrobe is that you don’t have to love everything all the time, and instead you have to know what you will love again in future, so you don’t part with it and regret it later,” Barron says.
How To Wear Everything reminds us that clothes play a huge role in our lives, no matter how we feel about fashion. So instead of starting wars with our wardrobes — and our social media feeds, which can make us feel ultra unstylish — we can follow simple style strategies to make our clothing work for us. Below, find a taster of Barron’s sage advice including five wardrobe staples she highlights in the book, along with how to wear them.
How To Wear A Black Maxi Coat
Don’t underestimate the satisfaction of putting on a long coat that a) goes with pretty much everything and b) makes you feel like you’re in The Matrix. Barron suggests a coat that’s slightly below mid-calf length, straight-cut and single-breasted — and black because it can make you feel however you want. Outerwear is one of Barron’s favorite staple categories. “I will often build an outfit around the jacket I am going to wear with it,” she says. “The complete look is the first impression, and that is important.”
How To Wear A Bralette
While you might overlook undergarments when auditing your wardrobe staples, Barron’s hawk eye for detail gives tighty-whities more importance. “A good bra or bralette, even if you just see a flash of it, can revolutionize the most basic of outfits, and can even replace a top altogether with the right jacket buttoned over it,” Barron writes.
How To Wear A Hoodie
“Off-duty style should be as aspirational as any sort of dressing,” Barron writes. “These are the clothes that we spend our personal time in, and we owe it to ourselves to make even the smallest efforts.” Barron highlights the humble hoodie as a staple of off-duty and on-duty style. Wear a cropped hoodie with high-waisted trousers, an oversized one under a duster coat, or a soft hoodie French-tucked into wide-leg trousers. “Some earrings or a stack of bracelets further serve to take the hoodie off the sofa, out of the gym and into the office.”
How To Wear Long Evening Boots
For Barron, “long evening boots” means a fitted boot that hits just below or over the knee, has a higher heel and a pointed or round toe. It’s the type of boot you’ll wear to a party or a dinner date or a formal work event. Boots are another of Barron’s favorite staples. “Over-the-knee, stiletto, block heel, flat and probably every other style you can think of are sat in a cupboard in my house just waiting for autumn,” Barron says. “Boots suit about 80% of the weather, and almost every single occasion. I can’t get enough.”
How To Wear A Tote Bag
Like capsule wardrobes, Barron believes in handbag capsules — and a tote bag should be your hardest working one. Since you’ll use it for work, travel and day-to-day living, she suggests finding a tote bag that goes with everything you wear. “Ensure the handles fit comfortably over your shoulder, even when wearing a large coat, and that they aren’t flimsy. An inner pocket is always useful to keep the essentials.” She also gives practical albeit controversial advice: “Please take time to regularly clean it out — I’d suggest once a week.”
To read more of Barron’s no-nonsense clothing advice, How To Wear Everything is available to buy now.
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In the 1990s and early 2000s, few retail brands were as ubiquitous as Victoria’s Secret. Elevated yet accessible, “Victoria” was in thousands of malls globally, her catalogs in every mailbox, and, most importantly, her bras in every top drawer. In 2001, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show starring “Angels” Tyra Banks, Heidi Klum, and Gisele Bundchen — the first broadcast on CBS primetime — was seen by 12.4 million.
But there was no real Victoria. There never was. She was a myth, a fairy tale, not unlike the fantasy the Angels created with their airbrushed bodies and hyper-sexualized personas.
What began as a specialty store in the Bay Area became a household name out of Columbus, Ohio, when retail magnate Les Wexner acquired it in 1982. Lingerie — namely, bras — was always the bread and butter, but clothing and a beauty line helped make VS a true powerhouse in the ‘90s and ‘00s.
In the 2010s, though, Victoria started to lose her grip. Brands like Aerie and Skims were gaining market share, the idealized body type was no longer in public favor, and the #MeToo movement was uncovering longtime misconduct within the organization from top executives, including Ed Razek, considered the architect of the VSFS as we knew it. Then came the biggest bombshell of them all: Jeffrey Epstein had been Wexner’s close confidant and financial adviser for years — and posed as a model recruiterto prey on women. In the wake of the news, Wexner resigned as CEO in February 2020, and was out completely the following year.
The rise and fall of Victoria’s Secret has been documented in many ways: a podcast, a docuseries, and, now, a book. In Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon, out on October 8, journalists Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez detail the history of the brand, drawn to it because of its massive role not only in retail history but also pop culture.
“To us, Victoria’s Secret was something that tells the story of American culture, because American culture is consumer culture,” Sherman says. As they peeled back the layers of Victoria’s Secret, they learned there was more than met the lace-trimmed facade.
“The story is more interesting and more complicated than just that the [campaigns around the] Angels were out of touch and misogynistic,” adds Fernandez. “It goes deeper than that.”
Amid Victoria’s Secret’s most recentattempt to rebrand (see: the return of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show next week), Sherman and Fernandez discuss what they think of how the brand engages with nostalgia, what surprised them most when writing the book, and how Taylor Swift fits into the story.
What were each of your personal relationships to Victoria’s Secret growing up? Lauren Sherman: I first interacted with it when I was super young. There was an era when, probably 10 years after Les Wexner bought it and it was already a billion-dollar business, that he was really focused on refining the aesthetic. I think we might’ve even used this term “class up the joint.” And he was really into using the narrative that Victoria was part British and married to a barrister. It was all burgundy and florals and just very elegant.
Chantel Fernandez: I was part of the Pink generation, so that arrived perfectly on time for me and a lot of girls born in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. I got my first real big-girl bra from there. I don’t remember a time before this brand. It was really dominant in culture, and represented something about beauty and beauty standards. But I thought Pink was fun. I thought the Victoria’s Secret side of the store was really intimidating, and I never really graduated into it.
You describe the Pink era really well in the book. I still have one of those little pink dogs somewhere. CF: Those dogs are genius. And the store in general — that’s such a big part of the Victoria’s Secret experience: their retail theater, how much care they put into how it was decorated, just being in there and sampling the lotion with your friends. You didn’t even buy anything. It was an experience to be in there. That’s a huge part of the success of the store and the innovation of that brand. A lot of that came out of Leslie Wexner, who at one point owned Abercrombie. He was thinking really innovatively about store design and how that was a form of marketing in and of itself.
What surprised you most when researching the book? LS: There’s a big narrative around this company that it was run by men — misogynists — who were just kind of doing what they wanted. And, in some ways, that’s true, but also every generation of this business had really strong female executives who were trying to do the right thing, empower women to buy lingerie and to be comfortable in their sexuality. I’d say that what we really tried to do with this book is show the whole story. It’s never just as easy as bad actors. There’s always another side to it. And this company accomplished a lot, and also employed a lot of really remarkable women who changed the consumer culture, the way we shop. It’s not really a revelation, but it’s more of a reminder that no story is so simple.
I’ll share mine: It was surprising just how young these models were. You talk about how Adriana Lima was just 15 when she started, and the model Danita Angell was just 14. LS: That’s super common. That was industry standard at that time in high fashion. There’s a model who’s going to become really famous soon, who just did her first magazine cover — she’s 15 and technically not allowed to work in Paris. Everybody’s talking about her under the radar, but it’s still a thing.
CF: [The models’] career was sort of meant to end when they’re 22, especially back then. Now, there’s not as much of an age cap. These supermodels are still walking the runway and doing these incredible things, but, when they started, they probably were under the impression that, even if they’re extremely successful, this is done pretty soon. This is an industry where you can be 20 and be geriatric, basically.
Victoria’s Secret attempted to rebrand in 2021. With so many mall brands like Abercrombie and J.Crew having a resurgence, where do you think Victoria’s Secret stands? Do you think the rebrand was successful? LS: Oh, the rebrand definitely hasn’t been successful. [The stock price] might be relatively flat right now, but, if you look at the business, the profits have shrunk. They’ve had a couple good quarters here and there, but they haven’t gained anything yet.
The success of Abercrombie and Fitch and the restructuring of that business is really not focused on nostalgia, but on product and what the consumer wants. The positive momentum Gap has right now is an indicator that these brands can return. The other thing is that consumers are penny-pinching right now, so mall brands have a place.
Also, there’s backlash to things like Shein bras. In some ways, that’s benefitted Victoria’s Secret, because people will just keep going back. But in some ways, it has hurt them, because they can’t apply the exact same playbook that these other businesses have applied. But I do think they still have so much market share, if they’re able to turn around the marketing and create product that gets people excited, there’s a chance that they can have a comeback. Even though, as we know, they never really left.
CF: I don’t think that it’s impossible for them to have a really interesting resurgence. Maybe not to the same degree that Abercrombie has had, which has been so unusually successful. But it’s not like everyone isn’t aware of this brand. They know it. It has the most stores for lingerie. If you still need a bra in a pinch and you fit their size range, that’s a huge advantage they have over the online brands. And a lot of people still want to try on their bras in person. And I think there is a nostalgia factor that they clearly want to play with, and they could, but it’s really tough.
A big shadow over the legacy of Victoria’s Secret is Jeffrey Epstein’s business relationship with Les Wexner. How did you approach that piece of the book? LS: I think the hardest thing was deciding how much of it we wanted to devote to that, because we could have pitched this book as a book about the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Les Wexner. That book would’ve sold very easily, but we didn’t want to do that because the reality is Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t involved in the day-to-day Victoria’s Secret business. And so we decided, as business reporters who cover the fashion industry, that we needed to write a corporate history — and he’s not a giant part of it. So, instead of weaving him through the narrative — which I think the documentary tried to do — we decided, Let’s put that in its own chapter. We could have probably spent five more years reporting this book and maybe would’ve come up with even more revelations around that. But, it’s interesting: If you look at the trajectory of Victoria’s Secret, the trajectory of Jeffrey Epstein, and the trajectory of American culture, the three things really align. Les Wexner severed ties with him in 2007, Victoria’s Secret was on the rise until then. There was foreshadowing in the early 2000s that something might be awry with the business. It peaked in 2016, right around the time of the height of the #MeToo movement, and then it really started to have its downfall around the time that Epstein was jailed.
CF: We put it where we did in the book, which was sort of as the revelations of Epstein were becoming public, because that was really the biggest impact it had. Victoria’s Secret was already in a weakened position, and it just further created problems for them. But it had a reputational impact more than anything else.
Shifting gears, in the book you write that Ed Razek gave Taylor Swift an angel wings ring. That was so interesting because I feel like the rules around who got to wear angel wings were very strict. CF: What I thought was so interesting about that was exactly what you’re saying — these really arbitrary rules about who gets to be an Angel. Like, “Oh, if you walk first in a segment or you close a segment,” and it was all these ways of creating hierarchies that, in retrospect, are kind of depressing. But it was an effective way to create storylines and narratives, and, within this world of the models, it was a reality show that we were watching. Like, “Oh, Taylor’s hanging out with Martha Hunt.” It shows how intertwined the brand was with culture at that time. Taylor Swift doesn’t really do brand work anymore. She really hadn’t played in the fashion or fashion-adjacent space. So it was really unusual and very effective. It was great for Victoria’s Secret while it lasted.
LS: I think it’s a real indication of the passing of time. That would never happen today. She’s much more in control of her image and, at the time, felt like she was so in control of it, but now she would’ve never — and forget about all the controversy. It’s just not something that you would imagine.
