When Fashion Is So Wrong, It’s Perfectly Right

Duran Lantink, the 2024 winner of the LVMH prize for young fashion designers and newly minted Jean Paul Gaultier creative director, believes in the beauty of the serendipitous error: specifically, a production snafu by which a garment in his fall 2025 collection for his eponymous label ended up morphing from one form to another, going from a wrong to a right, albeit one that looked like a wrong.

The item in question began as a shirt. But when the sample arrived from Italy, it proved unsatisfactory—the padding Lantink often uses to exaggerate and distort the body was different than usual, and he didn’t like it. Instead of scrapping the sample and starting anew, Lantink began to experiment. When he tried flipping the shirt upside down, he decided that it worked as a skirt and adjusted the pattern accordingly. “Grayson Perry, the British artist, has said that great art is making mistakes. They create another opportunity, which can lead to something that might be more interesting than the original idea,” says Lantink. In any case, he adds, “I try to avoid any sort of rule.”

He was not the only designer who rejected rules this season. For her first outing as Givenchy’s creative director, Sarah Burton sent out a blazer back to front and transformed it into a dress. Ellen Hodakova Larsson, of Hodakova, draped belted men’s trousers on a model’s head, turning them into a medieval style wimple. At The Row, a pair of stockings was repurposed as a shawl with vestigial feet. At Balenciaga, a hoodie was blown up into a gown, complete with kangaroo pocket; at Issey Miyake, a pullover received a similar treatment. Up-and-coming designer Julie Kegels created a dress that stands on its own, like a sartorial sculpture. And Marie Adam-Leenaerdt imagined a Joseph Beuys–like felt structure resembling a gift-wrapped present as the front of a dress, fitting the back like a regular frock to make the contrast between its two sides even sharper.

When designers stray from the predictable, they’re following precedent: The history of fashion over the past century has been about jettisoning the rules that once governed dress, such as the directives to wear hats and gloves. An early champion of the shock-tactic approach was Elsa Schiaparelli, whose heyday coincided with the rise of fascism in the 1930s. “In difficult times fashion is always outrageous,” she observed in her 1954 autobiography, titled, unsurprisingly, Shocking Life. From the viewpoint of today, it’s easy to see Schiaparelli’s oeuvre as a series of jokey pranks—her high-heeled-shoe hat of 1937, for example, seems amusing, even quaint. But to Schiaparelli’s contemporaries, most of whom didn’t know it was inspired by Salvador Dalí’s foot fetishism, it was weird and disturbing. Only her most confident clients actually wore one. These included the perpetually provocative Gala Dalí, who took the photo of her husband with a shoe on his head that sparked Schiaparelli’s design, and the acid- tongued Daisy Fellowes, whose appetite for drugs and other women’s husbands scandalized pre–World War II society. Fellowes shared her preferred couturier’s views on dress: “Fashions must be absurd,” she said. “A good fashion is a daring fashion, not a polite one.” She had the audacity to pull off the look—on Fellowes, one wag wrote, a shoe hat seemed “as practical as a good mackintosh.”

Ninety years later, Fellowes’s combination of confidence and chutzpah remains the blueprint for wearing daring clothes—i.e., act like whatever you have on is completely within the realm of reason. Layer The Row’s tights cum scarf over a raincoat. Repurpose the Hodakova headdress as a halter top. Today’s role models for this sartorial sangfroid include Timothée Chalamet, who got off a long-haul flight in a black latex Avellano coat, and Doechii, who accepted a Grammy wearing Thom Browne pannier trousers. Nothing to see here!

Schiaparelli had closed her business by the time Susan Sontag wrote her essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” in 1964, but the designer’s Surrealist oeuvre qualifies her as one of the aesthetic’s foundational figures (and one whose at the Victoria and Albert Museum next spring). As a concept, camp originated in 18th-century gay subcultures, but the wider acceptance of its outré delights dates to the late 1960s. That’s when modernism, which is predicated on restraint and order, got clobbered by postmodernism, which merrily swirls high and low, good taste and bad, past and future. For postmodernism’s champions, its anarchic qualities were exhilarating; for its opponents, they were inexplicable and just plain, well, wrong. Asked by Diana Vreeland to style a sportswear shoot for Vogue in 1971, the Italian fashion editor Anna Piaggi, whose personal wardrobe encompassed everything from vintage haute couture to Ballets Russes costumes, remained in character. Given Shetland sweaters and pleated wool skirts to work with, she swathed them in bright feather boas. (The latter were something of a Piaggi signature: An inventory of her wardrobe in 2006 yielded 31 of these plumed accessories.) The resulting photos were dismissed as “pastiche” and “simply awful” by Vreeland’s corporate bosses and never saw the light of day. Vreeland was fired soon after.

But Piaggi had the last laugh: Clashing aesthetics are now so wide- spread as to seem routine. During Jenna Lyons’s reign at J. Crew, the brand had tremendous success with Piaggi’s showgirl-meets-preppy look, doing her one better by overlaying cable knits and mumsy skirts with both feathers and sequins. Pastiche, meanwhile, has become as common a design tool as muslin or scissors.

Fashion loves eccentricity, as long as it’s also glamorous. Vreeland, Piaggi, Marchesa Luisa Casati, Elsie de Wolfe, Quentin Crisp, ­ Vivienne Westwood, Stephen Tennant, Loulou de la Falaise, Leigh Bowery, Isabella Blow—all are celebrated for their ability to dress (and behave) memorably. Put another way, they did the wrong thing the right way. Perhaps no one pulled off this exercise better than Edith Bouvier Beale, a cousin of Jackie Kennedy and Lee Radziwill’s and a camp icon. She was the star of the 1975 cult classic documentary Grey Gardens, aka the film that launched a thousand fashion shoots. By the time filmmakers Albert and David Maysles caught up with her, Little Edie, as Beale was known had retreated to the titular family house in East Hampton, where she lived in squalid seclusion with her mother, Big Edie. The Beale ménage included dozens of stray cats, several semi-tame raccoons, and mountains of rubbish. But despite the peeling wallpaper, collapsing roof, and an insect infestation so severe that the Maysleses buckled flea collars around their ankles before starting work each day, Little Edie’s spirit and style were undimmed. She sported skirts as capes, wound sweaters around her head and fixed them in place with brooches, and layered with the aplomb of Miuccia Prada. Staunch women, she declared, “don’t weaken, no matter what.” Nor do their legacies: Fifty years after the release of Grey Gardens, Beale’s aesthetic remains influential. One fan is Marc Jacobs, who re-created a Beale ensemble for Instagram during the early days of the pandemic. “Do you think I’ve lost my mind?” he asked his then 1.4 million followers as he posed in a leopard coat, sunglasses, and multiple silk scarves. It’s harder to cause outrage than it once was, though—the collective reply to Jacobs’s query was a robust “Of course not!”

How, then, to interpret Schiaparelli’s aphorism for today? Adam-Leenaerdt believes that the ideas that need exploring are both practical and philosophical. Wrong, she suggests, is a balance between the functional and the conceptual. “Fashion is such a big creative space, but at the same time it’s so segmented and codified. I like to play with all these codes and to have fun,” she says. “If a skirt is worn like a dress, but you can still wear the skirt as a skirt, then is it a skirt or is it a dress? I like these questions.”

Hair by Atsushi Yoshida for Dyson; makeup by Sara Fonseca for Chanel at We Roquete. Model: Sara Caballero at the Society Management. Casting by Ashley Brokaw Casting.

Producer: Amy Gallagher at WeFolk; Photo Assistant: Jules Muir; Retouching: Frisian; Fashion Assistants: Maria Francisca, Catarina Mota; Production Assistant: Paulo Dinis; Makeup Assistant: Marlene Santos.