Fall’s Most Intriguing Designs Are Made From Anything But Plain Fabric

At the couture shows in Paris this past January, the most talked-about accessory was neither an It bag nor a statement shoe but an alien robot baby—a husky, sparkling tot constructed of electronic panels, pearl-covered circuit boards, wires, cables, and thousands of Swarovski crystals that Schiaparelli designer Daniel Roseberry sent down the runway in the arms of model Maggie Maurer. It was made from what Roseberry referred to as “prehistoric technology”—flip phones, computer chips, and motherboards dating back to the days before going viral on social media was considered the ultimate measure of success.

Such wild creations are not surprising coming from Schiaparelli. The house’s founder was the mother of surrealist fashion, known for making gloves with claws on the fingertips, trimming boots with long fringes of monkey fur, and collaborating with Salvador Dalí to turn a shoe into a hat. Roseberry, since joining the house in 2019, has continued in that same vein. But this year, as other labels began to roll out their fall ready-to-wear collections, it became clear that he wasn’t the only designer turning eye-popping materials into major runway moments.

For his first collection at the helm of McQueen, Seán McGirr took inspiration from smashed phone screens to create a black, irregularly hemmed, rectilinear dress adorned with metal thread and ribbon work, glass beads, and laser-cut shards of clear Perspex that simulated broken glass. On the opposite end of the coziness spectrum, Jonathan Anderson opened his JW Anderson show with a sunny yellow top and skirt made from giant stuffed mohair tubes that functioned as comically oversize yarn—the design team used their arms as knitting needles, stitching the squishy cylinders directly onto a mannequin. The following month, in his role as creative director of the Spanish house Loewe, Anderson sent out a sparklier and even more labor-intensive creation: a voluminous, winged A-line shift dress with a caviar-beaded image of a Brussels Griffon dog sprawled on a grass lawn. The piece—which, on a model, had the effect of a walking tapestry—took 23 embroiderers 1,600 hours to make and was inspired, Anderson said, by antique high-society paintings featuring pets. A silk Balenciaga dress, meanwhile, was “frozen in time” through a process of wetting, bunching, and applying a crystallizing fixative, which makes it look perpetually windswept even when it’s standing still.

The use of unexpected and sometimes downright odd materials to make grand fashion statements is, of course, not a 2024 phenomenon. “These designers are building on a foundation that’s been laid by their predecessors,” says Daniel James Cole, an adjunct assistant professor at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology and the coauthor of 2015’s The History of Modern Fashion. Cole sees today’s examples as “the natural progression” of designs by sartorial provocateurs like Martin Margiela, known for such innovations as the porcelain waistcoat (1989), which was made from strung-together smashed plates, and the wig coat (2009), a wearable accumulation of faux hair. But even before fashion was an industry, dressmakers were thinking beyond the loom. In 16th- and 17th-century India, for instance, beetle wings were used as proto-sequins, affixed to fabric to produce a shimmering effect. The practice was appropriated by the Brits during the colonial period, reaching peak trendiness in Victorian England, where women flaunted what were known as “elytra dresses”—white muslin gowns that sparkled with thousands of emerald green bug parts.

At other times, designers eschewed fabric out of scarcity rather than a desire for adornment. In Japan, says Matilda McQuaid, the acting curatorial director at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York, “they were always working with interesting materials, which I think goes back to the lack of resources they had as an island nation.” One example is a 19th-century “sweat protector,” an undergarment meant to absorb perspiration and allow for air flow, which was made from recycled paper ledger books. A century later, Anglo-American designer Charles James also had to get creative when available fabrics failed to meet his needs, says the fashion and textile historian, curator, and conservator Sarah Scaturro, who ran the Costume Conservation Laboratory at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, in New York, and is now at the Cleveland Museum of Art. “He started laminating together multiple textiles, including nylon window screening, to get the buoyancy and volume he was desiring for pieces like his four-leaf clover gown.”

Scaturro points out that, over the course of history, innovations in fashion materials have often reflected developments in science and technology. James’s invention is one such example—nylon was first introduced in 1935, just as he was establishing his name. But the 1960s were truly the heyday of this phenomenon. The rapid rise of synthetics brought fads like “paper” dresses—which were usually some blend of cellulose and man-made fibers. First introduced as part of a marketing campaign by the Scott Paper Company, the idea was eventually picked up by various apparel makers and the likes of Andy Warhol, who did a dress printed with Campbell’s Soup cans. (Though it was touted as disposable, the paper dress’s influence on fashion was surprisingly durable: Three decades later, Hussein Chalayan used Tyvek paper sheets to make a jacket trimmed with red and blue airmail envelope stripes. Björk wore it on the cover of her 1995 album, Post.)

The advent of plastics gave rise to “space age” styles made from vinyl and PVC by European designers such as Pierre Cardin, André Courrèges, and Paco Rabanne. In the U.S., Betsey Johnson attracted attention with a line of completely clear plastic dresses sold with adhesive-backed plastic shapes that could be stuck on the body to cover up private parts. To Cole, that experiment in customization brings to mind a current-season Alaïa coat with black-on-black dots that can be removed and repositioned for a different look with each wear. The technique, says Alaïa creative director Pieter Mulier, turns the garment into “a canvas for creativity.” Unlike Mulier’s design, however, Johnson’s frocks were definitely NSFW. “A big part of ’60s fashion was about shock value,” says Cole.

The pressure to raise eyebrows has only increased in the Internet age, when attention seems to be its own reward. For the Costume Institute Benefit at the Met this past May, Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing transformed the singer Tyla into a human hourglass by encasing her in a gown made from sand and micro-crystal studs that he’d molded on a cast of her body. And who could forget Lady Gaga’s infamous “meat dress,” stitched together out of raw steak? Whether these attention-grabbing experiments qualify as fashion, or even clothing, feels beside the point. Time magazine deemed the meat dress the “top fashion statement” of the year in 2010, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame reportedly paid $6,000 to have it preserved.

Still, fashion experts aren’t ready to write off the most recent round of wild looks as mere meme-chasing stunts. Virginia Postrel, the author of the 2021 book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, sees the tech-inspired pieces, in particular, as incisive cultural commentary. “These designers are calling attention to the materials, and that is a response, perhaps, to our dematerialized digital world,” she says. Scaturro sees a pushback against innovations like AI and fashion NFTs (virtual clothing solely for cyberspace) in Anderson’s work, which depends on the hands—and arms—of actual people to produce. “I love that they used their arms to put the knit onto the body,” she says of the JW Anderson yellow set. “The more technology impacts our lives, the more we need to keep in touch with what makes us human, and that’s handwork and craft.”

At Bottega Veneta, Matthieu Blazy did just that, most notably with a handmade coat of embroidered leather strips that were knotted for a shaggy, pom-pom–like effect. Marni creative director Francesco Risso was similarly inspired to imbue his collection with a personal touch: A series of stiff, high-necked dresses was hand-painted with layers upon layers of broad, heavily textured brushstrokes to look like abstract artworks. Especially after the pandemic, he says, members of his team found themselves craving a more “visceral approach to creation”—and so, this season, Risso decided to do away with visual reference points or overarching themes and instead spend “hours and hours” painting fabric in the atelier.

“Fashion understood as a canvas, as a work of art, requires attention and sensoriality,” he says. “That’s what makes our work exciting day after day. We must protect our magic.”

Set design by Hella Keck at Webber Represents.

Produced by M.A.P Ltd.; Senior Producer: Elizabeth Cooper; Junior Producer: Saskia O’Keeffe; Production Manager: Matthieu Perdrizet; Photo Assistant: Bastien Santanoceto; Lab: Garage Film Lab; Fashion assistants: Martina Dotti, Manon Munoz; Set assistants: Nikki Lavollay, Celine Ruault.