In their own words: Objects of obsession from a group of young collectors at the forefront of a new collecting culture.
Vintage Flapper Dress
Everyone at the Prada show is just trying to embody the Prada-ness. (Lately, people have been dressing like fashion victims, but that’s a conversation for another column.) You show up to the Fondazione on the outskirts of Milan an hour early—which is unheard of in fashion; for every other show, you’re supposed to be ten to fifteen minutes late—and sit in the café designed by Wes Anderson and people watch. You see who has the nightgown coat from a few seasons ago. Or who still has their unlined lace dress from Fall 2008. Or who has somehow already got their hands on the Spring 2025 visor hats that aren’t even in stores yet. The idea is to flex your odd, intellectual, glamorous outfit.
The only flex beyond having a rare or spectacular Prada piece, or a normal Prada piece but wearing it in an absolutely outrageous way, is to have something so weirdly vintage that it out-Pradas Prada. So I’m forever searching for vintage dresses that are dippy and romantic and a bit mystical. Dresses that feel truly art deco—hard and progressive—but crucially, also, feminine and free. That is the essence of a great Prada dress. Plus, there will also be something in it that is a little bit wrong. Something that is off-putting, or awkward, or grotesque.
Most vintage flapper dresses are bad, but not in the Prada way. They’re just costumes—not getting at the
marrow of what deco was all about, which is, again, that hard and eccentric edginess, a smooth aggression.
But I finally found a really good one last year: sheer and long—that true flapper length, three or so inches above your ankle—with a silhouette as straight and as imaginative as an ironing board. It is covered in these enormous circles of bobbling glass beads, but the detail de résistance is a rather ragged, mean rabbit fur hem. This thing actually flapped.
I showed it to Caroline White, the historian at Bode—God bless Bode for having an actual staff historian—and she said she’d never seen anything like it. Gloat. I planned to wear it to the Prada show under a barn jacket with big chunky loafers. (Very Prada, and yet, none of it was Prada.) It looked great. Later that night, I was crossing the street and got hit by a motorbike. The dress ripped. I mean, really ripped. Beads flew. (I flew too. Don’t worry;
I’m fine.) I have all these rules—kind of a whole philosophy, actually—about how you should wear everything again and again and what’s truly good in fashion today will be truly good twenty years from now. But I’ll never wear it again. Still: it served its purpose. I have a theory about women designers who heavily reference vintage or the past in their work: they are proof that time travelers are dangerous. Because you show the present world what once was good, and what could have been.
RACHEL SEVILLE TASHJIAN WISE is the fashion critic for the Style section of The Washington Post.
