The NEW New Looks

INDEPENDENT DESIGNERS are heralding an END to QUIET LUXURY with their spectacularly SINGULAR VISIONS

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CARMEL SNOW knew it when she saw it. After attending Christian Dior’s debut collection on February 12, 1947, the then-editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar felt such a jolt that she famously declared that his designs had “such a new look.” The silhouette Dior unveiled that day has since become one of the most influential, recognizable ones in fashion history: a cinched waist with a full skirt that creates a distinctively feminine hourglass shape.

Dior’s New Look was revolutionary. Arriving in the wake of the Second World War, after a period when fashion, very much out of necessity, had become utilitarian, it signaled a return to dressing with intention.

Timing is everything in fashion. An unmistakable new silhouette or set of codes always arrives as a result of a confluence of social, cultural, political, and economic forces. Often, these bold shifts in design are representative of our collective reaction to what came before, a way of engaging and reckoning with larger shifts in the culture and as a way of proposing and imagining a new way forward.

It’s been five years since the start of the pandemic, and we’ve collectively, if a bit numbly, journeyed through the gentle, elastic-waisted embrace of lounge-wear and dutifully followed the algorithm as it wends its way through various trends and tropes, from quiet luxury to...quieter luxury.

We’re undeniably at the dawn of a new era now-one that has just barely begun to come into focus. But what's starting to emerge is louder, stranger even, and, above all, deeply personal. There is a collective yearning for the special, for ejecting ourselves from the stultifying sameness of our targeted feeds. As designer Willy Chavarria told