Fashion’s treatment of women and how it fits into the political landscape is on everyone’s minds at the moment, and has been, more covertly, for the best part of the decade. How do you make sure women have agency, in a medium where they are fundamentally objects?
For his Spring/Summer 2018 show entitled ‘Vicious’, Owens hired four sororities of step dancers, the Zetas, Washington Divas, Soul Steppers and Momentums, to perform and model his clothes. Choreographers Lauretta Malloy Noble and her daughter LeeAnet built the performance around stepping, a dance form which evolved in historically African American colleges as a mixture of step dancing, cheerleading and military drill, making the cast diverse by default, in race but also in body type, a fact almost as unusual on Paris catwalks as models of colour. The dancers, features arranged in a frown step terminology calls ‘grit face’, were anything but docile. They had a purpose, a reason to be on the runway. Their presence made the clothes necessary, rather than the other other way around.