All The Looks From Molly Goddard Spring 2023
Standout shows were almost all from creative, provocative female designers.
One thing the women of London share: they have a great idea and are able to build a whole world around it. Other brands struggle with this (I’m thinking, for example, of the way Jacquemus has become particularly Instaggrammy after the Le Chiquito was a smash hit, or the way Telfar fans focus on the bags far more than the clothes). But look at all that Molly Goddard has done with just a tulle dress (and a Rihanna dream!).
Her clothes have evolved; she was thinking this season about red carpet dressing pre-internet along with the weird, morphed silhouettes of Charles James. (“He strove for perfection which isn’t something I’m interested in but more the exploration of creating shapes on the body,” as Goddard put it in the show notes. Very canny.) Her tulle temples were scaled back into simpler, more streamlined, and perhaps even humbler ideas, like a ribbed peplum top and subtly ruffled skirt in a children’s bookish toile print of little baby animals cavorting in a forest. Her ruffled dresses have calmed over the past few seasons into something like an overall or smock, which you can throw on over a T-shirt for insta-pizzazz or put with a little bralet and a hacking jacket for something more refined.
That way of getting dressed, pulling yesterday’s T-shirt out of a pile on a chair or ritzing up something straightforward, seems particularly empathetic to women’s lives, which are so busy but get their verve and tempo from small day-to-day pleasures. Especially good were a clutch of swishy see-through skirts and a gown in electric-nature tones the colors of glowing cave bugs and one in a dull butter, and a drop waist cream dress with a heaving, romantic skirt that looked like lapped cream.
This article originally appeared on Harper's BAZAAR US.