WHAT WOMEN WANT

During the spring/ summer 2024 season, one question seemed to dominate: what do women really want out of clothes today? And why aren't more women designing those clothes?

- Grace O'Neill

There was a moment during Miu Miu's spring/summer 2024 show-the last show on the Paris Fashion Week schedule-that served as a kind of thesis about modern women and their relationship with fashion. The runway is a rarefied space for glamour, detachment and fantasy. It's often positioned slightly above the watching audience, like the stage in a theatre. It isn't a place best known for reality and relatability. And yet here was Miuccia Prada sending a model down the runway with an oversized leather tote bag tucked under her arm, the bag spilling over with the familiar paraphernalia of everyday life: a second pair of shoes, an overshirt; the bag covered in trinkets and keychains.

The show was smattered with these little details: models wore multi-coloured adhesive strips on their feet, their hair was oily and a little messed up. The clothes themselves were an ode to the kind of ad-hoc dressing that most women can recognise from their own lives. Wardrobe staples like polo shirts, trench coats and straight-leg jeans were gloriously mixed and matched with glittery elements like sequin-embellished outerwear and frilly little tutu skirts. They were the clothes, as one critic put it, that we "love, hoard and rely on". Opera coats worn over slinky nighties, drawstring shorts and rope-style sandals dressed up with sharp tailored blazers, an embellished evening dress thrown over a lopsided knit.