I've been seeing this dress by Almee Couture at NYFW 2025 reblogged all the fuck over on Tumblr and..... oof. Ugh. Yeah, since I've kind of been on the subject of art in fashion, it's time to get my fashion analyst hat out.
It looks like the mural in the kid's section of a public library in the wrong way. It's like F.A.O. Schwartz exploded all over the model. But since Tumblr tends to think anything with childlike whimsy is great and unimpeachable, I need to do some explaining.
This dress wears the absolute fuck out of the model. For real, any actual person who wears this is gonna get swallowed up in all that incredibly cumbersome beading and embroidery and rainbow vomit. There's no room for personality or that little individual touch that makes a look memorable, it's all just the DRESS.
Great fashion is more than just having impressive technical skill, it's about fit, and elegance, and subtlety, and more than anything, making the person wearing the dress look absolutely goddamn amazing, not the other way around.
Let's go back to the very first time you see art applied directly onto high fashion, the House of Worth sun dress of 1898:
Obviously, the golden embroidered sun rays are the focal point of the dress. But there's room for the eye to wander, and eventually the eye does make it back to the person (or in this case, mannequin) wearing it. The wearer isn't swallowed up in the explosion of the sun, rather, the sun brings light to the dress, and it feels like an actual dress with a stunning piece of art on it.
With Elsa Schiaparelli's iconic lobster dress, you see form and function taking precedent over the lobster, which was painted by Salvador Dalí. It's a flirty garden party sun dress, with all the lightness and elegance that it needs. The lobster on the front subverts the expectations of a garden dress, bringing wit and humor and a sense of surprise. It's the fact that the dress is otherwise functional that brings the delight of the outrageous lobster.
Yves Saint Laurent was in kind of a bind when it came to making fashion for the 60s. He was already known for making youthful designs, and mod had come in like a wrecking ball for youth fashion. At the same time, he was bound by the tradition of haute couture and the fact that most haute couture customers were ladies of a certain age who wouldn't be caught dead in a miniskirt. (yeah, one of the books I read flat out said that the Mondrian dress wasn't a miniskirt, and I had to go and look. The Mandela effect had struck again)
The Mondrian Dress did a LOT. It took art off the wall and put it directly on the body. It took the bold, graphic design of mod and applied it do an impeccably crafted haute couture dress. More than anything, it was a triumph of fit, keeping the rectangular shape of a painting but laying it over the body in a way that flattered the figure.
One of my absolute favorite fashion spreads of the era (it's up on Trove.com), showing how versatile and flattering this supremely hip dress was to everyone who wore it.
For more contemporary stuff, let's look at the fairy tale works of Paolo Sebastian, who is prone to the same sticky sweet Disney princess sentimentality, he just does it much more elegantly. In particular, let's look at this dress from his f/w "East of the Moon and West of the Sun" collection:
As you can see, it has much of the same sprawling, intricate design work. It tells a story and keeps the eye roaming over the dress, but the subtle use of color lets the viewer, and the wearer, breathe. The eye is drawn in rather then overwhelmed, and the beauty of the embroidery stands out rather than gets washed out.
So, yeah, bad dress, costume-y, clown-like, and generally lacking in taste and refinement. Learn fashion history so you can be a snob and a hater just like me.
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