For fall 2024, the catwalk is telling a story of understated softness and bringing everyday looks to the center of style. With transformed suiting, elevated everyday dressing, and understated elegance leading the fall 2024 catwalk, your keywords are “comforting softness.” Here are 5 of this fall’s leading fashion trends, focusing on the tendencies most likely to find their way from the catwalk to your closet!
Deconstructed Power Dressing
While some of the enthusiasm for remote work has dimmed since 2020, the trend toward a remote workforce hasn’t gone anywhere. You’d think with that reality, power dressing would be disappearing. It demands an audience and that audience dwindles daily.
But the famed power dressing of C-Suite is going anywhere. What’s happening is that it’s being transformed. Style icons, like Hailey Bieber, are changing the power of suiting, from shapeless workwear to structured, trendy elegance. Think 90s, Ralph Lauren.
Novel treatments of women’s suits are breaking the rules of corporate dress codes. With oversized blazers, mini skirts, strappy slingback heels, riding boots, loafers, belts, and a longline coat, power dressing is as hot as ever.
Dietrich and Dior: Together Again
Suiting is having a special day this fall, and Marlene Dietrich’s ultra-sexy smoking jackets, tuxedo suiting, and full, pleated trousers will be finding their way into your wardrobe. Especially as evening wear, tuxedo suiting worn with pillbox hats fitted with openwork veils speaks to the contemporary breaking of sartorial norms as once practiced by la Dietrich. With the house of Dior realizing her singular vision, she was a fashion leader without compromise or equivocation.
Broad satin lapels and cummerbunds meet crepe de chine. A white tie is redefined in a fitted tuxedo look that draws on the past while looking to the future. Your tuxedo styling might take the form of a long duster coat or a midi dress with aggressive shoulder pads. Key to the Dietrich look is to bring it your unique take with period details in hats, gloves, and even faux fur or feather stoles. Your look may reference the tuxedo as a halter top onesie, worn with a bow tie. However you twist your smoking jacket/tuxedo fashion, don’t forget the sky-high heels if you’re wearing your Dietrich-inspired look in the evening. For the day, well-polished, sleek leather lace-ups ground the style in the real world.
Balmoral Calling
Elevating the every day to bring it into the fashion moment is huge this fall. What does that mean? It is a trend that focuses on the nubby, realness of everyday moments. Let Queen Elizabeth at Balmoral be your guide. Her Majesty’s joy was to stalk the grounds of the Scots palace in her chunky, mud-spattered “outdoor shoes,” worn with thick wool socks. It doesn’t get more real than that!
Tweed and argyle, heavy corduroy trousers stuffed into green rubber boots, a boxy button-up jacket with a wool scarf tucked in the neckline—these details define the Balmoral look. Tough and created for long days of stalking the palace’s wildlife, these are clothes for the wild, craggy terrain of Scotland.
Embrace winter this year with the practicality and gusto of the late Queen of England! And don’t stick your nose up at that cable-knit sweater. Throw it on over a knee-length tweed skirt, argyle tights, and Mary-Jane flats. You’re ready to pass the “Balmoral Test.”
Camo Goes Soft
Camouflage has come and gone for decades, probably starting in the 1950s with beatniks like Allen Ginsberg. Its presence in US culture runs the gamut from being a symbol of the military to acting as the preferred uniform of hippies, punk rockers, and survivalists.
But in fall 2024, camo goes soft. And by “soft” I mean “out of focus.” The traditional camo is a well-defined scale of khaki green or brown tones. But this year, camo goes expressionistic—being what it is in a completely fresh and novel way. A long feather jacket on the Marni catwalk hints at the trend, adding tactile softness to the deconstructed, traditional look of camo. An A-line dress employs pinks to make its camo point. Prints are blurred and referential, offering a broad hint while not giving away the game. This ain’t your daddy’s camo. This is a fresh take that challenges the longstanding camo tradition.
Elevated, Softly Understated, Everyday Looks
Don’t hate me for saying so, but could grassroots aesthetic trends be trickling up? For example, isn’t Fall 2024’s tendency toward understatement strangely reminiscent of the Old Money aesthetic? Perhaps the voice of the fashionista is being heard in the halls of sartorial power after all.
This fall’s softness and the primacy of everyday looks echo the Old Money “wealth goes stealth” model. Relying on quality fabrics, flattering cuts, and unobtrusive styling, this fall’s understated elegance as everyday luxury speaks to an appreciation of fashion that lasts. This is fashion that endures because it’s made well, outlasting trends (slow fashion), taking pride of place in quality wardrobes more interested in quiet elegance than trendy display. A monogrammed sweater speaks louder than a sequin tank in this style universe.
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