The 2017 Fashion Moments I Won’t Forget

The runway is my beat, but the year started with a pulse-quickening reminder that fashion is made on the street. I’m talking about the Women’s Marches on January 21 and the grassroots movement that had crowds of women (and men) in Washington, D.C.; New York; and cities across the country wearing handmade pink pussy hats. I can’t think of another item of clothing that has been so quickly embraced, nor a form of political dissidence that is so optimistic and cheering. A pink pussy hat is the fashionable equivalent of a raised fist. It’s so embedded with meaning, in fact, that London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has made the pussy hat part of its Rapid Response collection and the city’s Design Museum has nominated the Pussyhat Project as a Fashion Design of the Year. Give it the prize!

                                                   
My favorite show of the year was Rick Owens’s Spring ’18. The shared camaraderie of wearing the black plastic ponchos; the Palais de Tokyo fountains going full blast; Owens’s wife, Michèle Lamy, cackling maniacally on the loudspeaker; the layers upon layers of clothes . . . Against the backdrop of Hurricane Maria headlines, Owens’s collection felt like a siren call about the climate crisis. Then, the California fires came. Owens is from California. Which makes me wonder how he’ll address that in 2018.

The week after we all returned from Paris, Vogue put on its first-ever Forces of Fashion conference. Everybody has a conference these days—they’re part of the new experience economy that we’re all talking about—but not everybody has Rihanna as a speaker! I interviewed Victoria Beckham, who made the job extremely easy, warming up the crowd by warning it that, with microphone in hand, she just might bust out into a Spice Girls song. Beckham discussed ambition, determination, and, believe it or not, the value of “not knowing what you don’t know.” Every time I doubt myself these days, I have VB’s encouraging voice ringing in my ears.