To me, Tom Ford could stay in Hollywood and never come back and fashion would still be more than thirsty to prioritise sex, they've been already pushing it for a while with emphasized lingerie and hosiery and embracing models that scream 'sex' (like Lara Stone) and this season in particular, it seems to have gone from lurking and being an option to actually taking center stage in mainstream collections and publications.. I mean, even Anna Wintour delivered a not so saturated cover just so the focus stays on Marion Cotillard's cleavage in this month's Vogue.
In my book, sexy is good in both men and women, sexual and vulgar isn't, in ANY of them. and I'm afraid we'll be seeing more of the latter as it's a territory people can hardly control themselves in and the limits are frequently broken.
The upside of the resurgence of an oversexualised aesthetic is that the antithesis doesn't take longer to follow in.. back when Tom Ford was pretending to empower women through vulgarity, there were so many designers and publications with an equally active fluid of ideas to counterbalance that, people like Jurgi, like Adrover, people that were creating clothes for real women that value their femininity as much as self-expression and creativity and wanted to feel like themselves in clothes and not like you have to wear
that dress because attracting men is the only thing a woman should have in mind when she walks out the door.
A little off-topic but it's amazing how predictable fashion can be even in a relatively short span of 10 years.. I was reading WWD's coverage of F/W 08 trends a couple years ago and how the mood and direction of designers was generally a confusing one being the fact that we were exiting a decade and it's kind of unsurprising how now, that the economy left its worst moment and we're opening a brand new chapter, everyone's trying to celebrate with the obvious, sex-in-your-face party.
I guess we can safely predict a lady-like revival for 2010 already!.