‘I love the swoosh of a sequin’: the party dress is back, back, BACK!

High on a pedestal above the fashion week crowd, a model fluttered her white feather fan in time to the strains of a jazz quartet, the starburst beading on her inky blue silk dress twinkling under the chandeliers. Another sipped a negroni as she grooved daintily in a molten gold strapless gown. A pistachio silk dress was accessorised with a beaded skull cap; handpainted velvet was edged with a neckline of black feathers; tiny evening bags swung on delicate gold chains.

As the grand marbled hall, where Rixo’s London fashion week collection was being showcased, filled up with editors, buyers and influencers, the audience shrugged off their Storm Eunice trenchcoats and gazed, saucer-eyed, at the Gatsby-esque pyramids of champagne coupes, which stood tall as Christmas trees in each corner of the room.

The pop of champagne corks reverberated through this London fashion week. It was an oddly soothing sound, like an all-clear signal after an air raid, to nerves jangled by two years on high alert. The shows have returned to familiar cheek-by-jowl near-chaos, after stilted seasons of masked models and socially distanced audiences. And the new look that is everywhere is not a colour or a must-have hemline or even a hot take on the tracksuit. It is the party dress.

A model in the Halpern show at London fashion week. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

At Halpern’s show in Brixton, slip dresses in flamingo-pink satin and tiger-striped velvet dripped from the models’ bodies like butter off hot toast. “I wanted it to be like, Anjelica Huston wakes up at a Scarface-era party after two years in a fever dream,” the designer Michael Halpern explained backstage.

Everywhere you went, there was dressing up, and there was dancing. Preen held its first show in two years in Heaven nightclub, under the railway arches at Charing Cross. Ballet students with messily knotted hair and thick scrawls of eyeliner wore ra-ra dresses of white feathers that spun around their hips like punk tutus while they danced. Every so often, a particularly high-energy leap would dislodge remnants of a glitter shower, from some long-forgotten Saturday night, from the rafters, to land in the lap of the audience packed last-dance tight on the wooden benches around the room.

A model in the House of Erdem show. Photograph: Pixelformula/Sipa/Rex/Shutterstock

Clements Ribeiro, the beloved 1990s London label relaunched by the designer Inacio Ribeiro and his wife, Suzanne Clements, last year, turned their teatime presentation into a Brazilian party, with professional forró dancers pairing up to show off their hip swings, and pulling punters on to the dancefloor to teach them some moves. Erdem Moralıoğlu added beaded opera gloves to slippery bias-cut dresses and sent the models into hushed darkness dotted with pools of milky light. He liked to imagine they were walking home from a club in the dead of night under streetlamps. “I love the swoosh of a sequin,” the designer said. “It’s always been one of my favourite sounds.”

The vibe shift towards dressing to go out – or to go out-out – is a radical change of pace. Until recently, two years of eerie tidelessness had left fashion beached. With nowhere to go, we gave up on dressing up. But, as the world allows itself to glimpse a light at the end of the tunnel, our appetite for getting back into the swing of things is returning. Fashion weeks are, undeniably, slightly ridiculous, but they are also part of life’s rhythm, along with muddy music festivals and glossy red-carpet film award ceremonies, office sweepstakes for horse races and water-cooler chats about Love Island. It’s deeply reassuring to see London fashion week getting the wind back in its sails.

Models in the Rixo show. Photograph: Shane Anthony Sinclair/BFC/Getty Images

That fashion should be all about the party dress right now is both the zeitgeist and a business opportunity. The rise of hybrid working has left many of us with a full-time office wardrobe and a part-time office schedule, so we have more smart work clothes than we need. And pretty much nobody is opening their wardrobe at this moment and thinking, what would truly thrill me to the bones would be a new tracksuit. It may have become fashionable to write fashion off, but after all that tablescaping and curating of Zoom backdrops, many of us have come to the conclusion that expressing personal style entirely through expensive twirly pastel candles and high-maintenance succulents is, in the end, a little airless.

The buzziest labels in London right now are making dresses for the dancefloor – or, at least, for a Netflix-and-chill vibe rather than just Netflix. Poster Girl is designed by Francesca Capper and Natasha Somerville, who met at Central Saint Martins and, between them, have worked in the Dior, Vivienne Westwood and Jeremy Scott design studios. The brand creates slip-of-a-thing candy-coloured dresses with heart-shaped cut-outs and micro-mini hems, and is already beloved of Dua Lipa and Kylie Jenner. Nensi Dojaka, the winner of the prestigious LVMH prize, trained in lingerie design, and it shows in her bra-styled dresses, corsets and stretchy knits. Supriya Lele’s halterneck necklines and hipbone-baring low-slung minis are riding high on fashion’s current Y2K revival, and brought a powerhouse front row that included Victoria Beckham to her show. The shift towards showing skin was striking at Simone Rocha, where flounced and opulent party dresses were, this season, shrunk to I Tonya-esque proportions. This is happening on the shop floor, too, in real time: Zara is full of distinctly un-February-ish mini wrap frocks in Pucci-adjacent swirls, and the midi dresses at & Other Stories have risque cut-outs and curving ruched seams.

A model in the Supriya Lele show. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

The rise of upcycling, making new clothes out of fabric remnants and pre-worn clothing, is also driving a focus on partywear. Young designer Conner Ives’s knotted-and-twisted frocks, sewn from vintage T-shirts, are proof that you can make something fun and flamboyant from discarded clothes. It is probably more difficult to make, say, a trouser suit or a tailored coat from odds and ends. Recycled Lurex fringing regenerates old fabric into new, the shredded texture adding to the general dazzle. And upcycled partywear feels like a celebration of old clothes, which fits with the values of a new generation of designers, who believe sustainability should look and feel aspirational rather than second best.

The party atmosphere can’t hide the fact that British fashion is having a tough time, squeezed in a pincer movement between the pandemic and Brexit. The biggest European luxury houses have experienced a remarkable bounce back from Covid. Kering, which owns Gucci, Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, saw a rise in net profit of 37% last year to $3.64bn; LVMH, home of Dior, Fendi and Celine, doubled its net profit to $12bn. Meanwhile, exports of clothing and footwear from the UK were last year down by almost 60% on 2018. That the job is more perilous than ever, combined with designers presenting their clothes at live shows, in many cases for the first time in years, fuels a sense of fashion week drama. “It was getting quite claustrophobic, doing everything in the studio,” noted the designer Molly Goddard, who built a 5ft-high catwalk for her first show since lockdowns began, and dressed models in fishtail taffeta dresses and tulle puffballs. “A show is quite cathartic, and inevitably it gives you a more extreme perspective.”

A model in the Poster Girl show.

A return to a normal that we can barely remember brings with it its own sense of unreality. “I’ve kind of been waiting to put on a catwalk show my whole life,” Ives said to me at his studio last week. As part of the Central Saint Martins class of 2020, he saw the graduation show that his studies, and childhood dreams, had been building up to cancelled at the last moment. “And now, after everything we’ve all been through … what, are we all going straight back to Milan and Paris and flying around the world? I mean, I believe in catwalk shows, but I also don’t feel the world can just forget the last two years,” he said, shaking his head in bewilderment, even as models filed through the studio door for final fittings. “I don’t feel like we can take anything for granted any more.”

Many of us can relate to that. And to some, it sounds like a reason to wear a party dress when you can.