A couple of seasons ago, I bumped into the magazine editor Eni Subair wearing ruffled bloomers with fishnet knee-highs and kitten heels outside the NewGen space at London Fashion Week. We all discussed how good she looked in the car back to the office, and Vogue’s roving photographer Phil Oh captured that nasty Victoriana moment for an article themed around the new stars of street style.
It was around the same time that Molly Goddard was stitching miniskirts into petticoat froths, Chopova Lowena was hemming bicycle shorts with flared broderie anglaise cuffs, and Jonathan Anderson was dressing bewigged models in M&S-inspired vests and knickers. Fast forward to the spring 2025 collections and vintage undergarments were being reintroduced en masse at Kim Jones’s Fendi, Alessandro Michele’s Valentino and Chemena Kamali’s Chloé. “Any form of French antique underwear is my dream summer wardrobe,” said Sienna Miller at Kamali’s presentation in Paris, having coincidentally bought a pair of 1970s bloomers from Portobello Road just the week before. “I’m going to send a picture to Chemena, because they belonged on that runway.”
And so: after season upon season of naked dresses, heirloom lingerie—less lascivious, more utilitarian in design—is being mainstreamed. Mere days after Rihanna was photographed in a corseted Dolce & Gabbana bodysuit dating back to the 1990s, Kaia Geber was papped in a delicate, lace-trimmed bralette beneath a slim-cut suit while arriving at a screening for her new film, Saturday Night. She looked as though she had been rifling not through her mother’s bombshell archive, but her grandmother’s drawers. The look is, as Alice Newbold wrote here, “a flouncy kind of femininity” and “a richly adorned romance” that perhaps recalls “a simpler, prettier time.”