Sitting on the front row recently, I experienced something akin to a Gallifreyan shiver. Mainly because I had been here before — decades previously. The way women were dressed, in the seats next to me and on the catwalk, made me feel as if I was undergoing some kind of time travel. All I needed was a Tardis.
The emphasis on tailoring, on a certain kind of sartorial smoothness, on power dressing and big shoulders, reminded me of the beginning of my career in the 1990s and even more of the 1980s when I watched fashion from afar as an impecunious teenager. As someone for whom Joan Collins’s Alexis Carrington Colby had represented, well, pretty much everything, this was heady stuff indeed.
Of course, this revival was always going to happen. That’s how fashion, as opposed to style, works. It’s an aesthetic that the American trend forecaster Sean Monahan has labelled “boom boom”, after the Boom Boom Room, the celebrated bar-cum-party-space at the top of the Standard, High Line hotel in New York. Monahan is someone to be listened to, having in the past nailed, and named, such mass aesthetic manifestations as normcore.
When lots of people start dressing in a certain way, it usually means something. Monahan sees “boom boom” in part as a reaction to what he calls the “terrible mass casualisation” that was fuelled by (though also predated) the Covid pandemic. He says too that it is “about millennials trying to navigate what being adult means to them”. This is fashion that is, in its polish and its performative expensiveness, quintessentially grown-up. It’s also exclusive in the most precise sense, in that it excludes ways of being and, relatedly, types of people.
“Part of being an adult… means setting up boundaries between your work life and your play life,” Monahan says. Part of being this kind of grown-up means inhabiting environments that are not only urban but very probably urbane. This isn’t a world of grime, or indeed Grime.
Also key here, I believe, is the present mood of jeopardy. It’s an interesting moment to be alive, but not necessarily an easy one. To want to wear clothes that serve as a kind of armour is a survival instinct.
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One of the brands I dreamt of armouring myself with three decades ago, another precarious epoch, was Joseph. What I wanted to be more than anything was a Joseph woman. I didn’t want merely to buy the brand’s clothes; I wanted to become that person. I would make a regular pilgrimage to the flagship boutique, as if all that soft power would somehow rub off on me just by me being in its proximity. Very occasionally I would buy a piece and feel transformed.
A look from Joseph S/S 2026
It’s funny how you forget and yet also, when something triggers a memory, how it can all still be there, a little dusty maybe, but oddly intact. I hadn’t thought about Joseph in years, and then I saw the first couple of collections of Mario Arena, its new creative director, which are arriving in boutiques and online now.
Arena, an Australian who has previously worked at JW Anderson and Christopher Kane, is delivering all that pulled-togetherness, all that burnish, that the original Joseph had. He has also added a 21st-century edge, be that a violet croc trench here or a just-the-right-side-of-1980s parody layering-up of statement bling there. (“I love, love, love designing jewellery,” he says with a laugh.) That occasional tongue-in-cheekness, combined with his adroitness with colour and texture, is what makes his designs feel so pitch perfect for a certain kind of woman at this point in time.
A similarly keen apprehension of the moment was what defined the brand’s founder, Joseph Ettedgui, who died in 2010. “He was a revolutionary, a trailblazer,” Arena says of the Moroccan-born designer-cum-retailer who had arguably as much influence upon how affluent professional women dressed in this country as more international names such as Giorgio Armani. “The Joseph woman has always been a powerful woman who, when she walks into a space, wants people to know who she is, but doesn’t want to shout, ‘Look at me’. ”
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Ettedgui had planned on being an architect but was, he once said, “terribly impatient”. Instead, he trained as a hairdresser because he “loved the way you could transform someone in two hours”. Courtesy of his eventual métier, he could transform a woman in the time it took her to get dressed. You could Wonder Woman your way out of those long-ago Joseph changing rooms in minutes. I know, because it happened to me. Now Arena is working that same magic.