Moda / Fashion
The power of a red dress Are you a “Tomato girl”? The little black dress is a classic about which almost everything has already been said, and we won’t touch it on its pedestal here, but designers thought more passionately this season and dangerously disturbed this classic
It was among the most widely shared and highly com- mented on fashion happenings of 2023. Hailey and Justin Bieber emerged from New York’s Bar Pit- ti, where they were awaited by a horde of paparazzi - she in a tight- ly fitting, strapless scarlet dress by Ermanno Scervino with stilet- to heels in the same shade, while he followed a few steps behind, wearing a scruffy hoodie and equally shab- by grey shorts, complete with yel- low Crocs sporting a smiley face lo- go. We’ve all heard many times how opposites attract – but such a sty- listic divide, with less than a metre between them, didn’t only provide for an attractive headline in the ce- lebrity press and on lifestyle por- tals, but also served as a kind of watchword for one of the biggest trends of this season: the “danger- ous” red dress. Loaded with symbolism of var- ious stripes – danger, love, courage and passion – the red dress is the fashion equivalent of an emergen-
and Margot Robbie. And this is all merely an extension of the “To- mato Girl” fad that was a TikTok hit throughout the summer, be- cause it describes the Mediter- ranean aesthetic to the gener- ation currently growing up on this social network. The red dress is an upcom- ing bestseller included in all autumn/winter collections: from those of Gucci and Pra- da to Zara and H&M. Matches- fashion.com, the renowned British website for online sales of prestig- ious designer brands, has confirmed that the number of searches for red dresses has increased 23 per cent over the past year. But the ques- tion is: how long will this trend per- sist? Instead of offering an answer, I’ll choose an apt quote of famous fashion editor and style columnist Diana Vreeland, who was forever fascinated by this colour: “I can’t imagine becoming bored with red - it would be like becoming bored with the person you love.”
cy siren. “Coloured” with confi- dence and fatal attractiveness, it comes complete with the Hol- lywood pedigree of Nicole Kid- man (Moulin Rouge) and Julia Roberts (Pretty Woman). Lana Del Rey sings about this dress in her hit Summertime Sadness, while Chris de Burgh describes a woman wearing one his popu- lar song Lady in Red. A woman wearing a red dress dominates wherever she appears – Hailey may have “opened the season”, but Emily Ratajkowski also caused a stir when she ap- peared in a draped version with a slit up to the thigh at the fashion show of British designer Jonathan Anderson for Spanish fashion house Loewe: the wind blew so strongly in Paris that day that the distinc- tive cut gained an extra dose of dra- ma - and hype. Apart from her (and Hailey), the red dress has been chosen for public appearances so far this autumn by the likes of Dua Lipa, Emily Blunt
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