The pandemic year afforded us an (perhaps much needed) opportunity to distance ourselves from the sartorial norms and conventions of the office: the crisp white shirts, the stiff suits, the sensible lengths. In the post-pandemic era, what does ‘dressing for the job you want’ mean anymore, when pants are optional in a Zoom connected team environment, and your expensive Italian wool tailoring has been left to collect dust? These are the kinds of questions that Miuccia Prada, in her Spring 2022 collection or Miu Miu, seems to invite us to ponder.
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This season, the traditional ideals of workwear are taken apart and satirised. The shirt, blazer and sweater, mainstays in anyone’s work uniform rotation, are chopped off perilously close to under-boob territory. Skirts are cut, as if haphazardly by hand, so short that their pocket linings show under the hem (and even shorter versions become bandeau tops). The midriff zone, in itself already a faux pas in the realm of the nine-to-five, is pushed to its stratospheric limit, as pants and skirts hang precariously to the hips – their belts seeming to make further mockery of the situation.
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Where rules of workwear are adhered to, this seems to be done as spitefully as possible. Formal jackets are made in luxe suiting material, but are defiantly left unfinished at the hems, and a few looks, while ticking the sensible shoe and skirt departments, were topped off mutinously with just a bra.
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