Fashion Week Was a Summons to Get Off on 9-to-5s—Or Get Out of Them
Is it just me, or did fashion month feel more like a whole damn fashion year? With Saint Laurent taking the closing shift in early March, Paris Fashion Week drew the curtain on an exceptionally long stretch of Fall/Winter 2025 shows. Throughout it all, a common denominator transpired, one particularly apparent in the City of Lights: Boardroom fever dreams went up against sensual spontaneities.
Vis-à-vis Severance, an insatiable appetite for athleisure, and a corporate 180 on work-from-home policies, we're witnessing designers mythologize traditional business wear. Teasing and toying with white collar uniforms has become fashion's new kink, despite, or because of, their waning necessity for even the most conservative of employers.
Balenciaga's (and soon to be Gucci's) Demna declared the FW25 collection his most "normie" yet, condensing his signature quadruple-XL styling into something even more horrifying: Ordinary clothes. He created slim PUMA sweats, puffer vests, and crinkly clerk tailoring — the “perfect suit” in his eyes — some of which was barely distinguishable from what's on-rack at your local department store.
Ironically, the one time Balenciaga cut down its broad shoulders was the season when peers eagerly revived '80s power dressing. Everyone, from the aforementioned Saint Laurent to Sarah Burton at Givenchy and Haider Ackermann at Tom Ford, is banking on bulk.
When they’re not dwelling on eras even further bygone, that is, with Chloé, Valentino, and McQueen rehashing the 1970s,’60s, and even the 1800s. Cue the ruffles, crystals, and furs to match silk slip dresses, translucent lace, and skin-tight boots. However heavy on the connotations though, these clothes weren't brazen displays of sexuality.
A far subtler, flirtatious sexiness ruled over these runways, with designers largely abstaining from raunch in favor of more allusive gestures. Figure-clinging fabrics, saucy reds, tousled hair, and supple leathers evoked a sense of hedonism minus anything carnal. At Miu Miu, for instance, the skirts were noticeably non-mini for a change and cone bras beat out conventional cleavage. And even something as overt as Duran Lantink's busty silicone top and animal body paint read as satirical rather than spicy.
In between those who fetishized 9-to-5s and those who sold regal bohemian fantasies of a life without them, another lot teetered somewhere in limbo: sacai was pin stripe pandemonium, Acne Studios served boxy blazers sans pants, and The Row captured that near-intimate, shoeless instant of preparing to bolt out the door.
In utter defiance of all of the above, Paris was bookended by Julian Klausner's Dries Van Noten hello and Jonathan Anderson's LOEWE goodbye. Both collections epitomized the best of each house. Klausner’s Dries debut was a stylish tribute to the original Dries's penchant for abundance, whereas Anderson's decidedly Anderson offering paid tribute to, well, himself.
Having previously tested the limits of max- and minimalism, designers are now exploring the interim. Professional propriety and retro romance emerged both as a middle ground and as a stance against defiantly ordinary casualwear and skin-baringly scandalous fashions. These are the throughlines that made this season a summons to either get off on corpcore's countless mutations or allow their office siren muses to finally take a hard-won sabbatical.
