Style Points is a column about how fashion intersects with the wider world.
At fashion week, the only place you’d usually spy a makeup compact is backstage. But for her much-heralded Givenchy debut this season, creative director Sarah Burton brought the everyday item to the forefront, collaging a powder-pink minidress and matching bag in upcycled compacts. It felt like a spotlight on the beauty work that so many women do, and how the unseen effort that goes into our appearances is so often erased.
That talked-about dress was just one part of a collection that celebrated femininity in an utterly fresh way. “I want to address everything about modern women,” Burton declared in her show notes. “Strength, vulnerability, emotional intelligence, feeling powerful or very hot. All of it.” Thus, a menswear-style blazer sported a nipped-in waist and mini hemline, while tutu skirts channeled a playful girlishness. And, even more refreshingly, the women wearing the clothes weren’t all sample size or in their twenties, making it the rare age- and size-diverse cast this season.
In a fashion ecosystem where women still make up only a small slice of power positions—as I reported around this time last year, with little changing since then—Burton is one of the few female creative directors of a luxury brand. Beyond the gender gap in the C-suite (or rather, the atelier), we’re also in a muddled environment when it comes to gender expression in fashion. With some notable exceptions, the majority of collections this season did not attempt to blur or question the gender binary, and in fact often fell into hyper-polarized camps. (Chalk it up to the lingering influence of bimbocore, the obsession with trad fashion, or the growing conservatism infiltrating every sphere of culture right now.) As we grapple with a post-Roe world and increased attacks on women’s rights, and amid a Women’s History Month that felt oddly muted, much of fashion seems to be reverting to the mean.
But tapping into traditional ideas of femininity in your work doesn’t always mean endorsing them, as an array of collections from thoughtful women designers—Burton included—demonstrated. With both her Prada and Miu Miu collections, Miuccia Prada was transparent about upending feminine codes, saying of the latter that it was “a reflection of and upon the meaning of women, expressed through clothes.”
At Prada, the models’ hair was intentionally mussed, and Mrs. Prada and her co-creative director Raf Simons outfitted them in retro visions of femininity. Even when the looks were ostensibly “put-together” and “ladylike,” an off-key note was struck, the discordant introduction of a delicious contradiction, like the bourgeois house dresses with slightly off-kilter floral prints. Traditionally feminine touches like bows felt more abstract than coquettecore cliché, flattened and deflated as they were. Meanwhile, the bullet bra was perhaps the biggest headline at Miu Miu. It was a typical Miuccia hat trick: an invocation of sex that managed to feel delightfully awkward, and gave us food for thought about how we both scrutinize women’s bodies and use fashion to reshape them.
Two other designers presented notable takes on the uncertain terrain that is being female in 2025. At Chloé, Chemena Kamali said her goal was to celebrate the multi-faceted woman. Having brought boho romanticism back to the fashion forefront, she was unstinting on ruffles and lace, but the ’70s ease of the clothes made them feel liberating in a fun, first-wave way.
And while “laptop to lap dance” might not initially seem like the most feminist premise, Stella McCartney found the humor and power in that contradiction on her runway, which included male and female pole dancers alongside models in bossed-up blazers. The goal, the designer said, was to deliver a “day-to-night wardrobe for the working woman, celebrating her at all stages of her life.” If you can’t actually have it all, at least you can dress like it?
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