You’ve heard what we’ve had to say, now it’s time to pass the microphone to the people who dreamed up and made the garments that came down the runways. There’s no universal message for spring 2024, a season in which desires for freedom and lightness coexisted with a focus on garments and their construction. Designers’ sensitivity isn’t limited to sniffing out what’s next, but can also be connected to their emotional states. As for many of the rest of us, it’s been a bumpy ride of late, and a few creators decided to share their struggles and vulnerabilities. That they’re quoted here shows that they stayed strong. Hear what they have to say below.
“I got tired talking about ideas—let’s talk about clothes.”
—Miuccia Prada, Prada
“I wanted to do almost nothing. I see so many complicated things, so many embroideries, so many decorative things, that I wanted to take it all off, to do no more than necessary. To make a clean canvas. Start again a new chapter for Saint Laurent.”
—Anthony Vaccarello, Saint Laurent
“I feel at the moment, especially with what we’re doing, the clarity has to be there…the customers want to know how to use it. Luxury doesn’t have to be an extreme proposition.”
—Sharon Wauchob
“I want to make grown-up clothes.”
—Peter Do
“I started from the wardrobe, because I felt the urgency to put together the pieces that I like and that I don’t find.”
—Sabato De Sarno, Gucci
“Changing the perception of wearability.”
—Glenn Martens, Y/Project
“Familiar-unfamiliar and unfamiliar-familiar…. Things that you really know but done in a completely upside-down, inside-out, special, strange way.”
—Dries Van Noten
“How do you twist something so it’s ‘Oh, yes—I recognize the Oxford shirt and white pair of jeans, but then it’s off in a weird way? There’s a subversiveness to it. But it’s very civilized.”
—Jonathan Anderson, Loewe
“Everybody’s decided to be realistic. The thing is, how to be different when everybody’s doing ‘normal’ clothes again. Maybe when you have so much past, [like us], you do it in a different way.”
—Jean Touitou, A.P.C.
“People that enjoy fashion, that live in fashion, create realities around us that aren’t necessarily linked a hundred percent with the reality of the world outside that is horrible and ugly. We need to create our own bubble of beauty.”
—Alejandro Gómez Palomo, Palomo Spain
“Finding the strangeness in the mundane.”
—Jonathan Anderson, JW Anderson
“I wanted to embrace imperfection.”
—Jason Wu
“I have to be me. I can’t repress my creativity. I can’t castrate my vision. I just can’t do those things. It’s not me. So this collection is a celebration of everything that I love about fashion.”
—Demna, Balenciaga
“Nothing beats the joy of being able to express yourself freely. Everyone should embrace that precious mindset of not caring about what others think.”
—Arthur Arbesser
“I’m out there now… Being independent, I’ve had to limit myself with other collections, people were telling me that I need to consider the stores. With this collection I said, ‘fuck everyone,’ I’m just going to do what I feel is right.”
—Guram Gvasalia, Vetements
“I think that clothes are a part of the scenery of a person’s life. Like when you go on a first date and confess your feelings to someone, the clothes you wear become part of that experience.”
—Shinya Kozuka, Shinyakozuka
“What this collection is about is this: I die tomorrow, I just want people to remember that I made sure that Balmain is a French luxury house. And what is French? I think this is more the question.”
—Olivier Rousteing, Balmain
“I’ve always talked about legacy. I’ve always said what I’m doing is not just for me. I am not here for the money; I didn’t set up [my brand] for the accolades. I’m here to create a platform for people who look like me.”
—Foday Dumbuya, Labrum London
“The idea was blending worlds. We took inspiration literally from all around the world: South America, Southeast Asia, Russia, Brittany, Sicily…we tried to blend them to create some kind of new culture.”
—Mathieu Blazy, Bottega Veneta
“You’re telling stories all the time, about where I am now, what I’ve experienced, and on the side I’m telling China’s story as well, about how we manufacture and how we put things together.”
—Huishan Zhang
“It’s about time the West meets the East.”
—Prabal Gurung
“It’s about togetherness. It’s about bringing people together for an analogue moment.”
—Glenn Martens, Diesel
“It’s so important, bringing that woman closer to the man, so that they’re one universe.”
—Peter Hawkings, Tom Ford
“I wanted to give a physicality to those pieces. Not because they had to look surreal, rather because I wanted them to occupy a space, and to be touched and experienced in close proximity by the audience.”
—Francesco Risso, Marni
“I was talking about friendship between women and the friendship of clothes.”
—Nadège Vanhee, Hermès
“We’re always drawn to what women have done in fashion throughout history. We look backward to look forward.”
—Laura and Deanna Fanning, Kiko Kostadinov
“Seeing Samantha Jones when I was a teenager just inspired me. My admiration for women that are successful and self-reliant, who live their lives without apologizing, started with her, together with the dream of New York.”
—Mark Gong, Markgong
“I want it to be like, ‘I’m going to the party, but I’m also sitting on the couch and I don’t care. I’m so sick of going to these events and just seeing the girls not be able to sit down. Everything’s ripping. They can’t move. It’s too stiff. I want everyone to be comfortable and still put-together in a suitable way to take on the patriarchy, you know what I mean? We don’t have to stuff ourselves in high heels to do it.”
—Hillary Taymour, Collina Strada
“We go to weddings and always feel they need an edge.”
—Christa Bösch and Cosima Gadient, Ottolinger
“As women in the world, we are told to be certain things, and the only thing we can really do sometimes to escape that is to lash out—but then that could be held over our heads. I’m constantly thinking about the balance between expressing myself and being poised. And so maybe I show up to an event and I’m put together, but I’m going to put whatever I want down the runway. That’s my release—maybe that’s me throwing a fit.”
—Carly Mark, Puppets and Puppets
“This marks the 10th year that I do an actual runway show, and I was thinking how all this hustling and bustling really paid off, because it’s such a beautiful thing to be a New Yorker and be recognized in the city. And it kind of sets the tone of having to show out when I do a show.”
—Raúl Lopez, Luar
“But really, I want to break this thing that collections have to be about one reference. I think that in fashion we also have this risk—that we give references that people think they can’t attain personally. So I really want to create a wardrobe where there is just a little bit of evidence that you can personalize your style.”
—Maria Grazia Chiuri, Christian Dior
“There are no citations, no recognizable attributions, everything comes to life in a magical no-place.”
—Marco de Vincenzo, Etro
“I’m always talking about being practical and technical when it comes to making clothes—that’s what I do every day. But at the beginning of the season I start to set the universe, the story. This time it was like that feeling of the last day of school before you go off for summer. So at the beginning of the show, it’s the archetypes of varsity and college things because we’re still on campus.”
—Nicolas Di Felice, Courrèges
“My starting point is the characters that live in the Land of Setting Sun, which is the imaginary utopia I created through my branding.”
—Kozaburo Akasaka, Kozaburo
“There’s always a dark side to everything I do, and in this moment, we have a kind of vulnerability that we as a people have, that the youth have. There’s a period of destruction, to show the kind of dystopia I think the younger generation is experiencing.”
—Willy Chavarria
“I felt like I had to be a warrior, I had to keep going, and at the same time I felt inside like I was gonna crack!”
—Cynthia Merhej, Renaissance Renaissance
“Usually for the people in this [corporate] world, money and power aren’t usually really real; it’s just lies and debt and whatever. And maybe on a mental level, [I was] “expressing how difficult it still is to work in this industry.”
—Ervin Latimer, Latimmier
“We wanted to comment on the concern for the extreme heatwave we’ve all suffered these past months. We know it isn’t going to go away anytime soon, and raising awareness through creativity is of the essence.”
—MM6 Maison Margiela
“There are elements of it being about survival, and the world right now is full of environmental and political issues that are forcing us into being reactive in our actions—movement can happen any time.”
—Natasha Zinko
“Clothes can be broadly divided into two sides: costume-like aspects and tools for daily necessities. I entered the fashion industry because I originally liked the costume-y side of it, but I don’t think the industry is in a good place right now, so I’m trying to update it in my own way by presenting clothes as tools rather than just costumes.”
—Naohiro Fujisaki, Meanswhile
“In previous collections I was inspired by new things from the outside, but this time I felt that I had to face the pain of my own traumatic experiences, in order to create a more personal collection.”
—Yohei Ohno
“There is a slightly deeper note in the collection. This connection between something that is inside of us that we’ve been trying to hide, but maybe we also want to expose.”
—Roksanda Ilincic, Roksanda
“I think it’s just the idea of how much, collectively, our hearts have taken in the last couple of years. All the sort of pain and loss that we’ve just had to quickly wash away. But also the feeling that, no matter how hard you’re hit, your heart remains unbroken, but it can be bent. And this pathway is a river bend that can lead to people that support you and save you.”
—Paolo Carzana
“After Covid, I felt like the world got really dark, and I think now we just have to enjoy the moment because we don’t know what’s going to happen next. We’re making these clothes to make people happy, to spread that joy.”
—Viviano Sue, Viviano
“I just felt it was time for more light, more lightness, more butterflies.”
—Nicola Brognano, Blumarine
“I wanted to create a sort of put-together weightlessness.”
—Filippo Grazioli, Missoni
“I want it to be an absolute blast of sex-positive, body-positive, joyful celebration—of everyone. That was the brief, really. I was like, ‘Don’t be shy, enjoy it. Feel the joy, feel the moment.’ ”
—Ashish Gupta
“If you leave nothing to the imagination, what happens to desire? Desire and fantasy are so much more interesting than pornography.”
—Alexandre Vauthier
“I’ve always been dying to do something about dreams and nightmares—I have crazy ones myself—so I thought this was a nice moment to celebrate chaos and find serenity in chaos. I feel like the craziest dreams in the world can be the most beautiful.”
—Jackson Wiederhoeft, Wiederhoeft
“Not fetish—that’s not a good word—but it’s personal obsessions that I wanted to do in a way that other people didn’t. Using latex, using leather in a different way. Creating a silhouette that’s very feminine, but yet quite different than what you see today.”
—Pieter Mulier, Alaïa
“We wanted our collection to happen in the street, which is a sort of cinematic set where people are both stars and voyeurs.”
—Giorgia Tordini and Gilda Ambrosio, The Attico
“If I do fashion [instead of art], I collaborate with people. Fashion is universal and in the streets, what I like about [it] is a moving image.”
—Elisabet Stamm, Stamm
“My work plays on how viewing something on a photograph versus seeing it in real life alters your perspective.”
—Maisie Wilen
“It’s like doing a painting or sculpture. I keep going back, a day later, a week later: You know, it’s just a gut instinct. In a world of digital and AI, I want to do real stuff—real life, physical. My world is complete fantasy, but it is here in reality.”
—Matty Bovan
“This collection is about the beauty of the process, but it’s also a response to artificial intelligence. People are typing their prompts and getting the images faster, but maybe it’s working too fast.”
—Shimo Zhou and Une Yea, Staffonly
“While there’s a lot of fear surrounding AI, I wanted to romanticize the idea of the robot and how it might connect with the human subconscious.”
—Susan Fang
“Humans make AI, and we make it intelligent,” said the designer. “We can use it to become smarter and keep our humanity.”
—Xander Zhou