The Best Fashion Right Now is Made for Movement

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On a warm March evening inside Paris’ Grand Palais, where a packed house of celebrities, fashion editors, and buyers had flocked for the Chanel runway show, a familiar voice blared over the loudspeakers. “Just dance, gonna be okay,” went the familiar chorus to Lady Gaga’s popular club hit. Even the most impassive models appeared unable to suppress the soundtrack’s effect on their movement. Some seemed to bounce with each stride, shifting their weight from left to right with a bravado that gave even more swing to their drop-waist skirts and opalescent gowns. I could barely sit still as I watched.

After shuttling between scores of fashion shows and showroom appointments, my body ached to break away from the week’s rigorously scheduled circuit and move freely. I danced recreationally when I was younger, and had recently started taking classes again. But there in Paris, without the backdrop of any dance studio, I wanted to turn up the volume of George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90” and step-step-slide my way down the Champs-Élysées, throwing my whole body into every sway.

I wasn’t the only one with such urges on my mind. Beyond Matthieu Blazy, who presented his second ready-to-wear collection for Chanel that night, several other designers offered portrayals of dance and movement this season. It wasn’t as much about the spectacular scenes of those runway moments that stayed with me long afterward as the yearning to also move my body—and the clothes that allow me to feel so physically rooted in it, that something almost primordial kicks in. Something much deeper than style or trends.

At Junya Watanabe, the show was staged as an operatic scene, with models in elaborate, armor-like gowns spinning and sashaying—some even dramatically tossing off their coats, as they exaggeratedly acted out mood swings. The runway at Tom Ford, an organized chaos characterized by multiple models simultaneously taking to the runway (and often in diverging directions), required the expertise of a choreographer, while Matières Fécales included a cast of moody figures who theatrically twisted and contorted their bodies with almost every step as they sedately stalked around a circular runway.

Both Cecilie Bahnsen and Reverie by Caroline Hú, meanwhile, featured choreographed dance performances, with professional dancers standing in as models. “I was thinking a lot about emotion that can’t be expressed through stillness alone,” Hú explains. While runway shows typically distill down to a series of social media-friendly still images, Hú wanted to explore “something more fluid and instinctive” with her layered tulle and cotton mesh constructions. She enlisted choreographers Emma Portner (with whom Hú worked the prior season) and Matt McCreary to bring the collection to life with dancers who each performed their own emotive solo down the runway.

Fashion and dance, particularly ballet, have long been intertwined. Just look at our enduring love of ballet flats, wrap sweaters, and bodysuits, not to mention the frequent costume collaborations between designers and dance companies. Conversely, there’s been an equally long history of dance on the runway, including McQueen’s memorable Spring 2004 show, featuring an opening performance by a troupe of African American step dancers who continued to stomp, clap, and close in on the models as they attempted to walk the runway. More recently, there was Marc Jacobs’ exhilarating Fall 2020 show, a collaboration with the choreographer Karole Armitage, in which more than 50 dancers clothed in the designer’s wares performed around the seated audience, while models paraded by. This season’s representations hit differently, though. They felt more timely, more reflective of where we are in our personal lives—and where many of us want to be right now: on a dance floor.

“People want to move, to get out of their heads and share something with their friends,” says Margot Hauer-King, who co-owns People’s, a popular nightlife spot in downtown Manhattan where impromptu dance parties have become a signature. “We’ve never tried to force the agenda, but that doesn’t stop people from jumping up when their favorite song comes on,” she adds. “It’s magic when you see the room moving like that.”

There’s a reason that the finale dance scene in the film “Saltburn” went viral, spawning an entire sub-genre of memes and imitations, and it’s not just because of the actor Barry Keoghan’s nude derriere. There’s also a reason that Blazy’s new Chanel campaign video, released a few weeks ago, went viral–watching Margot Robbie and Kylie Minogue bounce and skip through the streets of Paris while recreating Minogue’s iconic “Come Into My World” music video was exhilarating. Or consider Robyn’s new album “Sexistential,” an amped-up 30-minutes of pure dance-floor pop. After an especially long and punishing winter season, I can already picture this as the soundtrack to crowds of skimpily-clad bodies dancing like lunatics this summer. Whether it’s in a studio space, a darkened club, or at home when no one’s watching, increasingly, more of us are tapping into a sense of freedom, joy, and maybe even a more fearless version of ourselves through dance—myself included.

Growing up, I took ballet, tap, and jazz classes at a local studio after school, but I lacked grace and instinct, and with my lanky body and long limbs, my missteps and poor timing were even more glaring. I learned to keep my body quiet with smaller, less visible movements instead. Yet lately, I’ve found myself shedding these decades-old layers of self-consciousness at places like downtown Manhattan’s Forward Space, an all-levels-friendly studio where classes happen in a darkened club-like room. Between the darkness and how exhilarated I feel afterward, I’ve stopped overthinking it. For 50 minutes, I drop my hang-ups—my appearance, my ability to nail a step or keep in time with the instructor—and I dance my face off. It feels messy and rebellious, and entirely my own. As Hauer-King, who also regularly dances at Forward Space, bluntly put it: “It actually doesn’t matter whether you’re good or not. The point is, you’re dancing.”

After presenting her fall collection in Paris, which she titled “Practice,” the Danish designer Cecilie Bahnsen described the thrill of surrendering to spontaneity and the possibility of imperfection. A collaboration with the choreographer and dancer Myrto Georgiadi’s Marseille-based collective, Oráma Atelier, the show played out like a dance rehearsal, a physical embodiment of Bahnsen’s nod to the work that goes into mastering a skill—the act of doing, making, repeating—seen in the form of body-skimming silk dresses in demure pastel shades, cozy knits and sweaters that wrapped the body, and sporty anoraks. As organized as it was, Bahnsen had to forgo any final tweaks backstage. “Because everything was happening so fast, we couldn’t touch or fix every outfit. We just had to let it happen,” she said, grinning.

For Caroline Hú, the tension between restraint and letting go is often dance’s greatest allure. “I’ve always been drawn to the state formed in unintentional, fleeting moments,” she says. “Dance is an honest form of expression; it exists somewhere between control and release.” In my own practice, dance allows me to declare space for myself, while simultaneously getting out of my head. It’s activated a profound mind-body connection I’ve never experienced before, and now can’t imagine existing without.

For the stylist Brie Welch, dance is a way of being in the world. “It’s become intrinsic to how I operate, both mentally and physically. As someone who’s a bit shy, dance has always allowed me to emote feelings simply. It’s a language everyone can connect with,” Welch tells me. A lifelong dancer since the age of three, Welch, who is now 40, also notes how dancing has influenced her professional work: “It’s shaped the way I think about inhabiting garments—prioritizing functionality, movement, and how the eye travels across the body through silhouette.”

Like Welch, I’m an extroverted introvert prone to bouts of shyness. Only fashion has typically been the means to express my emotions—or mask them. But dancing and feeling more in my body than ever before has given me a heightened sense of how I actually physically feel in my clothes: how I actively move in them, and how they move around me. Recently, I’ve started to wear things with a little more motion: a periwinkle silk skirt by Kallmeyer that elegantly flutters in the breeze when I walk; a vintage, leather miniskirt with dangling fringe that whips around my legs when I turn around. It reacts to my own kinetic energy, a clever, sartorial reminder that to move—to dance, to spin, to step-step-slide—is to be alive.

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