Long Live The Resistance!

The new power dressing for women serving on fashion’s frontline

 

- Genevra Leek

Next month marks one year since the passing of the late, great Bill Cunningham, an industry legend and much-loved pioneer of street-style photography. The American lensman reported to The New York Times for close to four decades, moving among the highest levels of society to capture the essence of personal style. You could say he’d seen it all. So when he stated, in his unassuming way, that ultimately “fashion is the armour to survive the reality of everyday life”, we know it was a hard-won observation, and as it turns out, one that has never been more relevant than today.

Fashion has always been a barometer of our changing times. Like the arts, the stock markets and the amount of digits in our bank balance, clothing is the sartorial canary in the coalmine, so to speak. In our politically unstable present, there’s one surefire certainty, and that’s that designers will respond, usually with more insight and vision than some would give them credit for. Take the SS17 collections, rolling out in the months leading up to the US election. While the world’s fate wasn’t yet sealed by an outcome no-one could have predicted, designers were already gearing up for battle with a platoon of action-ready looks aimed at empowering women, if not entirely with physical protection, then at least galvanising our state of mind.