Couture week has always been full of celebrities, but right now, everyone looks like they’re dressing for the character version of themselves.
As I watched models move through these enormous silhouettes (sleeves that look like they could knock over a tower, skirts that seemingly take up an entire stadium) it clicked. This is fashion at full volume. And honestly? That’s exactly where Gen Z lives.
Gen Z doesn’t really get dressed the way millennials used to. They don’t just put on sunglasses. They give mob wife. They don’t just wear a vintage skirt. They aspire to poetcore. You walk outside and you’re not wearing denim, you’re announcing an era. Everything is coded, referenced, named, memed.
Couture, in all its absurd, impractical glory, is doing the same thing. It’s trying to be instantly legible from across the room, and of course, from across a screen.
The world is loud. Life is heavy. Everything feels a little unstable. And Gen Z responds by going extreme: extreme humor, extreme aesthetics, extreme self-definition. Couture responds with extreme clothes.
As of this writing, we’re still waiting on the chaos and romance of Giambattista Valli, a show that traditionally delivers its own brand of larger-than-life storytelling. But even without them, the message of this couture season is already clear: Gen Z extremes are in; Millennial gray is out.
So when people ask, why are the gowns so big this year? Why the huge hats, the volume, the exaggerated everything?!
Honestly, it’s simple: couture is speaking in the language of a generation that doesn’t want to disappear. And couture, for once, is on time to the conversation.
