Will oversized ever be over? It’s a question I increasingly ask myself when confronted with fashion show after fashion show of slope-shouldered jackets hanging to knee-length or beyond, sleeves dangling, trousers dragging.
Last winter, I thought change had finally come — via the ferociously pulled-together look of Anthony Vaccarello’s stellar Saint Laurent show in January, which appeared to be an indicator of a collective urge to tug everything in tighter, to eschew the sloppy, the saggy and the baggy. A year later, it seems I was wrong.
Indeed, the spring/summer 2024 collections — men’s and women’s alike — were overstuffed with oversized stuff. Prada proposed feather-light tailoring with wildly extended shoulders, sleeves falling well below the wrist. The Row opened with a Working Girl-proportioned trench and, a few outfits in, had a sweater of Brobdingnagian dimensions swamping the poor model.
Bottega Veneta proposed one of those too, alongside giant swirling caban coats similar to the ones Maison Margiela slung over sloppy suits, which were in turn echoed by Victoria Beckham’s relaxed (read: ginormous) suiting. The coat that opened the spring Balenciaga show was so big it was actually made from two sewn together, and the season closed out with the much-awaited debut of Phoebe Philo, the former Céline creative director. Her first own-label collection was decidedly slouchy, composed of mannish tailoring and soupy sweaters drowning the body.
These clothes, and oversized clothes in general, can say a lot of things all at once, sometimes in seeming contradiction. Muchness indicates abundance and wealth, profligacy and waste. When Christian Dior debuted vast spreading skirts in a still ration-stricken Paris with his New Look of 1947, working-class women were so infuriated by its symbolism of luxurious waste that a mob literally tore the clothes from a Dior model during a photo shoot on the streets of the city. In Los Angeles, the ostensible reason behind the racially motivated Zoot suit riots of 1943 — so-called for the flamboyant suits with wide-shouldered jackets and baggy trousers originating in black communities but also worn by Mexican-American teenagers — was those clothes’ “unpatriotic” waste of fabric during the war. Conversely, one reason the suits were so proudly sported by these often marginalised communities was their communication of wealth and status.
On the flip side, ill-fitting clothes speak perhaps of poverty, and sometimes thrift — sibling hand-me-downs or clothes bought several sizes too big so that a child can “grow into them” over time, pinching a penny and reducing the need to replace. I remember going to secondary school in a polyester twill blazer with shoulders sloping off my own narrow frame for that reason — in hindsight, very Balenciaga, but back then a source of much embarrassment.
Oversizing clothes has a long history — think of the sumptuous XXL opera coats of the 1920s, right the way through to Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall suiting that spun off a craze for boyfriend jackets in the late 1970s. At the turn of the century, the phenomenally influential designer Martin Margiela showed a series of collections exploring the notion of enlarging clothes, sometimes expanded by fabric insertions, sometimes blown up in scale. His styles are those most referenced by designers today.
But you can go back a few centuries before these examples. Almost as soon as tailoring was invented, people began to look at ways not only of fitting garments to the body but abstracting from it, refashioning the figure through its clothing to exaggerate, emphasise, disguise. Henry VIII — an already oversized man who stood over six feet tall and, in his fifties, boasted a waistline in excess of 52 inches — used fashion to bulk out his impressive frame even further. His tailors padded his broad shoulders to gargantuan proportions, indicative of majestic might and strength. His richly embroidered doublets were swathed with loose mantles to further extend the torso, so that, in the famous portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger from around 1536, Henry seems almost as broad as he is tall. The king’s clothes were transformed into a walking propaganda device, as outsized as his dynastic ambitions. The same could be said some 450 years later, when Giorgio Armani dressed ’80s Wall Street in slouchy boulder-shouldered jackets that jostled for space around boardroom tables.
Oversized can also evoke a fragility — like a child swimming in adult garb. Incidentally, that’s the reason I mostly don’t do oversized: I’m 5ft 7in and have a tendency to look as if I’m dressed in my dad’s clothes. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, designers of the aforementioned brand The Row, were often papped in the mid-noughties dressed in giant tailoring, oversized Starbucks cups clutched to dwarf their hands. This came to symbolise the Los Angeles aesthetic of the era, emphasising waifish skinniness through excess fabric, almost as if the clothes were too big for the bodies to carry. In December, in homage to that look, Balenciaga staged its fall 2024 show in the same city, presenting maxi-scale coats that seemed to fill the width of the street they were paraded down.
Oversized, however, doesn’t mean ill-fitting — even if it sometimes seems so. These clothes are interesting because they often involve feats of engineering to keep them in place. A pair of huge wool-silk trousers from The Row boasts a corseted waist to anchor the fabric in position; Vivienne Westwood’s Alien trousers are cut with two waistbands, one fitted for support, another oversized to droop decoratively over the top. Balenciaga’s tailoring is intentionally cut to slope off the shoulder, crafted to hold its own heft; Phoebe Philo cuts her jackets closer to the body while oversizing the sleeve, cutting with a swaggering curve to give the impression that everything is much bigger than it actually is.
While oversized has been in before, generally it falls out, succeeded by its exact opposite. The oversized sweatshirts and broad-shoulder tailoring of the ’80s were followed by the shrunken suits, hipsters and skinny slip-dresses of the ’90s. Oversized swung back again as a reaction to that — but, almost two decades in, it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Maybe it’s indicative of a general breaking-down of the idea of seasonal trends in favour of a wear-what-you-like approach. But it may also be tied to comfort — big clothes, generally, are easier to move around in, looser and softer.
It’s inevitable that the notion of convenience — the motivation behind many developments across culture and technology over the past two decades — should find ample reflection in our wardrobes. The only place bigness doesn’t seem to have a hold in fashion? The most practical place: handbags. Generally, these have shrunk to ever-teenier proportions, perhaps to make everything else look larger.
The big holdout? The aforementioned Philo, rightfully credited as prophet of fashions to come, launched a bag she dubbed the XL Cabas with a base span of some 57.5cm — a centimetre and a half over British Airway’s maximum hand baggage dimension. Maybe tides are changing.
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