How fashion is wrapping itself in festive trimmings

Fashion once again enters the spectrum of the absurd and ironic through the creation of designs wrapped in garlands or tinsel. Festive ornaments or Christmas motifs that designers have turned into grail pieces, used as creative resources by Loewe, Vaquera, Chopova Lowena or Molly Goddard.

This new effervescent trend draws precisely from the idea of reusing and experimenting with fabrics, beyond reopening the debate about the meaning, function and purpose of post-pandemic fashion. A trend explored in depth by JW Anderson, among codes and elements sheathed in festive, trashy and surrealist ornaments that once again distort the concept and essence of luxury to connect with the zeitgeist of today’s fashion.

Designers are now finding this new form of expression, which they channeled through the AW22 and SS23 seasons. In them, tinsel textures ruffle the garments, while Loewe’s furry mules or Vaquera’s balaclavas illuminate their looks. Although, in this sense, Chopova has been the one who has really elevated this aesthetic, fusing the strange and luxurious in plaid skirts with musketry, pants and body jewels that filled her SS23 runway show with jubilation. Not to mention the elvish and maximalist hats signed by the eccentricity of Goddard.

This irreverent and unusual attitude also beats now in the world of design in proposals such as Balmain or Prada, who decorate their products with Christmas elements as part of this new contemporary vision in which decadence is romanticized and ugliness is elevated as if it were a collective and aesthetic norm of the time.