SHIFTING TIDES AT RESORT 2025
What do Tom Ford, Valentino, and Louis Vuitton all have in common? WRONG! The answer is: they all showcased shift dresses at their most recent Resort shows for 2025. Many other fashion houses did the same, including Chanel, MaxMara, and Stella McCartney (my Vogue Runway subscription is the best money I’ve ever spent). But what exactly is a shift dress? A shift dress is a sleeveless short dress that hangs down loosely from the shoulders with a non-fitted look, typically featuring a high neck or boat neck cut.
The loose-fitting dress style has its roots in Coco Chanel's designs from the 1920s, with her infamous LBD. This style was liberating for women, as it emphasized comfort which juxtaposed the dominant, more constrictive styles of previous eras, ie. corsets. While Christian Dior’s “New Look” of the 1940s and 1950s brought back the hourglass shape as the most desired silhouette, and with it brought back constrictive fashion, the 1960s “mod look” reintroduced the looser style dress, known as the shift dress. It became popularised especially by designer Mary Quant, who was a pioneer for garments geared towards youth and their culture. This was especially revolutionary at the time, as the youth was just becoming recognised as a separate consumer to children and adults - a group we now classify as teenagers. Quant frequently played around with shorter hemlines and boxy cuts as a rebellion against Dior’s “New Look” and England’s post-war fashion, which favoured a more conservative, tailored look.
Luxury fashion houses have historically adapted to changing tastes during periods of economic downturn. Upper-class consumers tend to move away from gaudy, statement pieces and gravitate towards more casual, understated items, the shift from the sleek, body-con dress to the boxy, bohemian shift dress is a good example of this phenomenon. This trend is further supported by the growing interest in "quiet luxury," which emphasizes subtlety over overt, logo-centric branding. A recent example of this fascination with quiet luxury is the ultra-trendy "office siren" aesthetic, which has an understated feel. The boatneck mini dress, which had its viral moment within the aesthetic’s arc on social media, has possibly been reinterpreted by these luxury fashion houses in a more bohemian style to give us the dresses seen at Resort 2025.
References:
BBC News. (2023, April 13). Rosie Holt's social media videos win her live comedy award. BBC. Retrieved July 15, 2024, from https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-65269428
Park, A. (2023, April 25). What is a shift dress? InStyle. Retrieved July 15, 2024, from https://www.instyle.com/what-is-a-shift-dress-7974233#toc-the-shift-dress-in-the-1960s
Nanda, R. (2021, November 23). Fashion on the ration: 1940s street style at the Imperial War Museum. Culture Trip. Retrieved July 15, 2024, from https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/england/london/articles/fashion-on-the-ration-1940s-street-style-at-the-imperial-war-museum
The Editors of Who What Wear. (2023, March 27). What is a shift dress? Who What Wear. Retrieved July 15, 2024, from https://www.whowhatwear.com/what-is-a-shift-dress
