018 Chic savages
What is sexy dressing in 2025? And the best kind of lists.
A question that fashion people love to ask is whether sexy is back. Sexy dressing being, after-all, kind of the antithesis of fashion until it is decreed that it isn’t. Intellectual, kooky, oversized, pared-back effortlessness tend to be the go-to propositions (wink!) for insidery fashion. A few years ago when we were all asking if sexy was back I asked my gorgeous Vogue colleagues to dress in the ‘new sexy.’ We were all talking about how post pandemic (actually it was still going) the fashion world was reacting to those confined, sweatpant-ed times with corsets and cut-outs, filmy silks and mini-skirts.
The mini-skirts stayed - in fact they went too when pantlessness came in - so too the crop tops and scant lingerie-inspired looks from the likes of London-based Albanian designer Nensi Dojaka.
I interviewed Dojaka during this time and she told me thinks of her designs as empowering for women, a summation of contrarian instincts.
“When I design and I think about looks, if I have a look that is a bit more on the aggressive side, I always have a very lightweight bottom because for me, this fragile and delicate part is very important. Because this is how I see women, you know, between … strong and delicate. This is how femininity is for me, about the balance of both.”
But what is sexy dressing really? It’s not the Victoria’s Secret runway, another absolute antithesis of fashion and also sexiness - which returned last year and nobody cared.
Is it Balenciaga’s lingerie on the runway last year that caused the inimitable Vanessa Friedman to ask if ‘sex is back on the table?’
What about Lauren Sanchez’s overtly sexy Inauguration ensemble? The white bra heard around the world was, if anything, a crystallisation of an overt shift in culture. As Naomi Fry wrote in the New Yorker, the return of breasts (another thing that fashion periodically decrees are either in or out, which is unfortunate for all of us in possession of them) signals something as such.
Of this hostile political climate we can make of the return of cleavage, as Fry writes, “The long-held hemline index, a theory that correlates the strength of the economy with women’s skirt lengths—minis in a bull market, midis in bear—doesn’t quite fit our current sociopolitical moment, but it could make more sense to consider what might be called the boob index. What does it say about the times we’re in when vocal attention is paid to breasts in the public sphere?”
As Fry writes too, these are not tasteful and demure times. It’s every woman and her hoiked up, pushed-up breasts for herself.
This past week I’ve watched a lot of movies about sex, but actually they’re about power. Anora, which broke my heart, is about Ani, a dancer and sex worker who’s trying to get her piece of the American Dream. Are her fake nails and tiny little thongs and fur sexy? Then I watched Babygirl - Nicole Kidman a revelation! - her pencil skirts and silky pussy bow blouses with trailing ties and spiky heels definitely are, but is that just because we’ve been told as such? In 9½ Weeks I can’t get over how good the ‘80s beige overcoat and little grey linen suits and perfect white shirts are. The bowler hat though, it has to go! Was Kim Basinger the hottest in the movie when she dressed as a man for the scene in the club and smoked a cigar? Maybe!? What about the scene in the equestrian shop? No wonder Helmut Newton once said Hermes was “the world’s greatest sex shop – with its whips, saddles, spurs”.
Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke and the bowler hat in 9½ Weeks.
Oh then, Newton, creator of some of the world’s sexiest fashion editorials (not everybody loved them, Susan Sontag called him a misogynist to his face). I had cause to revisit one of his editorials made with the inimitable Polly Mellen who died, aged 100, late last year.
The Story of Oh, is - as Emilia Petrarca wrote in Harper’s Bazaar in an article called ‘The Serious Woman’s Guide To Dressing Sexy’ , it’s on the brain huh - the kind of editorial that would probably get you fired today!
It’s very erotic. It makes you feel something. Even, as Petrarca notes, with Mellon’s breathy little bits of copy. Things like “the dégagé charm of a neckline left untied” and “the imagination to knot a streak of fishnet around her bare throat” and “this isn’t the moment for anything else on the body except perfume.” Fragrance ought to be applied by the way, notes Mellen, in one’s ‘episternal notch,’ the hollow at the bottom of the throat.
Anyway, I think what we’re looking for in these movies, in sexy dressing, is the contrary, the ugly, the perverse.
Pencil skirts, for one, are sexy because they’re both demure and hot, repressed and up for it.
As Vogue wrote in the 1940s of the tailored skirt suit, “A suit to work in, serve in, live in, all through the busy daylight hours of your new double-duty life.”
Ahhh, double duty life. Isn’t this the power source of the allure - the librarian who lets her hair down, the chief executive who laps at a bowl of milk, the brassy sex worker who’s smarter and more self possessed than the people who own the private jet.
Fashion has always been obsessed with tension. It’s why it will always toy with ideas of sexy dressing. Ultimately it’s on us to decide. That’s our power source. All of these clothes can be sexy clothes, it just depends on its wearer.
Not the bowler hat though!
Books
I absolutely inhaled John Fairchild’s Chic Savages. Fairchild was the editor and publisher of Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) from 1960 to 1996 and the founder of W magazine. He was acerbic and witty and feared and admired and beloved and this book, written in 1989 is so perfect on fashion’s many follies and frailties and fabulousness. Obviously so much has changed since then, this is pre the internet for one! - but also people kind of stay the same. One thing I dog eared was his ‘ins and outs’ list. Fairchild really invented this kind of list, in its truest form. Like all the best lists it is both imperious and opaque, definitive and illogical (this is why I adore society decorator Nicky Haslem’s lists of what’s common every year, for eg, last year it was almond milk and Whatsapp - I don’t know, it just is!).
But the important footnote is his reminder that it’s a very fine line between who is in and who is out, and these places can swap in an instant.
Speaking of imperious, I’m also dipping in and out of The Diary of Virginia Woolf (volume 1, 1915-19). One of the things she can’t stand are “fashionable ladies, who want to be told what to read.’ Oh no!
Love,
Annie xx