Today’s most exciting designers aren’t celebrating the old-money lifestyle; they’re perverting it.
It can be difficult to tell what’s actually “trending” in fashion and style at any given moment, but if there’s one look that feels truly, compellingly dominant, it’s prep.
Lurking beneath some of fashion’s most exciting collections are good ole fashion preppy clothes. Celine’s Hedi Slimane continues to mine the look of early-2000s New York and Los Angeles, but just as many of the models at his Los Angeles show in December looked like extras from the original iteration ofscheming in school uniforms with their enormous designer bags thrust into the crooks of their arms like status shields.
It can feel like everyone is playing tennis; everyone is buying vintage Cartier watches; everyone is taking their L.L.Bean totes out to pillage the Goodwill in the best parts of town for fisherman sweaters and discarded Oscar de la Renta. In the words of a WASP doyenne I know, “It’s scotchy-wotchy time”—but why?