“Damsels in His Dress”

October 17, 2010

Repost of WSJ.com

Damsels in His Dress
Whether it’s tycoon pinstripes, Cary Grant flannels or Churchill tweeds, the season’s most smashing styles for ladies come straight from the gentleman’s playbook

SlideShow on Tomjames.com

By JOSH PATNER
In the 1920s, Coco Chanel changed the course of women’s fashion forever when she abandoned her frilly corsets and petticoats and raided the oh-so-English closet of her lover, Étienne Balsan. Her scandalously gamine wardrobe of men’s blazers, jodhpurs and tweed waistcoats was the germ of the suits made of jersey—previously the stuff of fishermen’s underwear—that built her empire.
F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas
The fall season may celebrate a heaving bosom—chests spill from low-cut, La Dolce Vita necklines and corset tops are key at Louis Vuitton and Prada. But the women’s collections also play with the sobriety and sharpness of menswear with a focus not seen in a decade.
Many of the clothes, like Marc Jacobs’s three-piece mélange tweed suits, echo the trailblazing style of the Duke of Windsor, who popularized them. The materials are straight from the haberdashery, even with the feminine touch of a clover-leaf collar on a long, double-breasted jacket.

At Chloé, the kit of a sporting man has replaced the pretty babydoll dresses the label is known for. Floor-length camel coats recall a 1920s polo player on the sidelines before the next match. Dries Van Noten’s collection of tomboy blazers in camels and checked tweeds, worn school boy style with the collar popped, were equally sporty.
The trend is part of the fashion industry’s broader return to the streamlined, understated trend dubbed “minimalism” by the press when avant-garde designers such as Jil Sander first swept away the glitz of the “Dynasty” era in the early 1990s.
Designers have often relied on menswear as an antidote to frilly frocks. Well before minimalism, Yves Saint Laurent debuted his Le Smoking jacket, a provocative twist on the men’s classic. And in the 1970s, Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler looked to the clarity of menswear in reaction to the bold prints of the 1960s.
Menswear Suits the Ladies, Too

From runways to retail, many women’s styles for fall seem to draw from men’s closets. Here’s a guide to the look.
Menswear looks offer women a feeling of empowerment in serious times. “This is a big shift as the customer is now dressing in classic sportswear,” said Ginny Hershey-Lambert, an executive at Bergdorf Goodman. “There’s generations of younger women for whom this language of jackets, skirt-suits, trousers, clean lady-like handbags and so on, are new ways of dressing.”
As the excesses of the millenial era disappear and the recession tugs us down to earth, we face a similar backlash. A fresh generation of designers is turning to menswear for a straightforward response to frivolous clothes.

Their approach begins with the no-nonsense palette of grays and browns and the subtle detail of clothes once made for the navy yard, but pushed to feminine extremes.
At Céline, Phoebe Philo whittled down a woman’s cold weather wardrobe to essentials like body-skimming, dark navy peacoats conjuring images of naval officers on parade. Micro hemlines, sleek gray flannel trousers and classic loafers—made sexy on a high platform—update the officer’s look.
F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas

The Camel Coat: Sportmax Camel Double Breasted Coat, $1,350,
Raf Simmons used hyper-masculine tailoring as the base for a working woman’s wardrobe at Jil Sander, with notch-collared jackets turned into severe dresses that skim the body and skinny Cary Grant-esque flannel suits.
Prada’s approach to the menswear revival is slightly more radical. The boy-meets-girl mood comes from heavy double-faced cashmere cut into flirty, 1950s-style dresses.
According to Pamela Golbin, chief curator of clothing and textiles at the Louvre Museum, women have long since adopted men’s style without the help of designers. “After World War II,” she said, “the utilitarian ease of men’s clothes was slowly incorporated into women’s clothes with the rise of the female workforce.”

By the 1950s, menswear fabrics had been so fully incorporated into women’s clothes that even Christian Dior, fashion’s legendary king of femininity, made hourglass skirt suits from flannel, a masculine fabric rarely seen inside a French couture house at the time.
Céline’s peacoats and Prada’s gray dresses are luxurious relations to wartime duds, when fabric production was limited to sturdy, military materials and women borrowed their husband’s clothes while they charged the battlefields of Western Europe.
Although the season’s runway looks borrow from the sartorial history of a gentleman, they’re anything but dowdy. Designers have transformed these classics by playing with volume and by pairing them with unexpected accessories, like crazy-colored shoes or tough punk jewelry.

Contradiction is vital in wearing the look well. Dries Van Noten uses opera-length gloves and leopard-print scarves to offset boyish blazers. And the decadent Parisian designer Christophe Decarnin turned John D. Rockefeller pinstripes into body-hugging power suits at Balmain.
With an abundance of dapper choices, women no longer need to nick their lover’s clothes to enjoy the freedom, comfort and command of a gent’s uniform. It was, after all, Chanel who was said to have remarked, “How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.”

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