There were no farflung inspiration trips for design teams this year; COVID put paid to that. Instead, designers stayed close to home, taking imaginative journeys through art and fashion history.
“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery,” wrote Jane Austen some 200 years ago, and most designers tend to agree. Things were really looking up at Erdem Moralioglu and Yuhan Wang, where waists rose to the Empire line as they did in Sanditon, and in the author’s day.
In many other cases, designers plumbed their own archives. Donatella Versace, who has been ahead of the trend, looked back to her brother’s early ’90s collections as she was developing her wet and wildly colorful spring lineup. Olivier Theyskens referenced himself. Matthew Williams’s debut at Givenchy included nods to Alexander McQueen and Riccardo Tisci who were both at the house before him, and at Lanvin, Bruno Sialelli riffed on images of 1920s designs by the house founder Jeanne Lanvin. Sialelli said he likes “the idea of re-edition.” Clearly, he’s not the only one.