It was the skirt length that I noticed first. Hanging idly somewhere between the calf and the ankle. On top a classic crewneck sweater, with a handsome yet simple coat topping it all off. It’s the no fuss no frills look worn by women at home anytime in the 1960s or the 1970s or the 1980s especially as they approached “middle age” (which at the time would probably just be their 40s). It does not belong to any trend really, or at least not the way that we now think of how people dressed in those decades—there are no remnants of mods or hippies, no disco, no power shoulders. It is the simple marker of completely appropriate, never disturbing femininity. It’s the look you see now on old ladies at the market or on the train because they never switched up how they dressed. You might be tempted to take a photo and post it on social media with the caption “chic!” because it is. They are perfectly put together specimens of a particular kind of woman. A friend tells me she calls it “nouveau dowdy” when she gets dressed in the style. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” these women might say about a variety of different things—including their own wardrobes.
It arrived first this season, unexpectedly, at Tibi. Two skirt suits, one in a paper-like gray fabric, and another in a maroon plaid, were both of equally awkward proportions. The jackets were a mix of tailoring and sporty anoraks and were both slightly too long—like a dropped waist that fell a bit further down than it was supposed to. They worked though, paired with matching below-the-knee skirts. At Gucci, a model wore little pink gloves with her A-line princess coat with bracelet sleeves, a sliver of hem from the skirt underneath still visible; even when worn by a young beautiful model the message was non-cool, which is different from uncool or not-cool, because it isn’t trying to be so it can’t fail at being.
Photo: Courtesy of Co
The best example of the look appeared at Co’s fall collection, where designer Stephanie Danan called it “La Concierge.” This is what they call the women who take care of the old apartment buildings in Paris, where the designer now lives. She described them as women who have “been living [at the building] for years, they’re very gossipy and somehow always look like they’re dressed in weird Prada.” Even without going to Paris, or seeing a picture of the clothes, that description alone conjures an image of a woman (Madame in French, Doña in Spanish, Signora in Italian), that would likely be accurate.
The great Signoras of fashion, of course, could be expected to take this archetype and do something totally exciting. At Fendi, where Silvia Venturini Fendi took over the womenswear while a new creative director is named following Kim Jones’s departure, the look was rich rich rich—especially with an abundance of fur (chevron minks!) and fur-ish textures (shearling and mohair), (This is also my humble petition to simply let her design the womenswear, which is always decadent and sensual and fun when in her hands.) But it was at Prada where Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada made obvious the underlying subversion of appropriating this look in 2025. “What does femininity mean today? How can it be defined?” they asked themselves, and the answer also lay within the edges of shapeless-but-not-really house dresses—some in “ugly” florals—with big covered buttons, tweed coats with extraordinary fur collars that threatened to overpower the wearer, and blouses and straight skirts that had been pushed, pulled and gathered this way and that. “Within feminine beauty, when you think of its archetypes, there is lots of restriction of the body—here it is free,” Simons said to Nicole Phelps. “There’s an idea of liberation. Total liberation. And ideas can be liberated also.”
