Designing the Nuclear Wife: The Toxic Feminine in Fashion

The past few fashion seasons have seen a resurrection of styles that locate themselves in the haze between the 50s, 60s, and 70s—in the tense years of the white wife on screen, of Tippi Hedren, Monica Vitti, Sissy Spacek, Gena Rowlands, Mia Farrow. Balenciaga’s knife heels pointed like bird beaks, Miu Miu’s prom pastels ready to be sullied with blood, Acne’s soft florals, the kind found on a bathrobe never removed. These trends call to the cinematic women left alone with their feelings, pathologized or self-medicating. The years when the toxicity of American normativity seeped onto the screen, when the nuclear family was revealed to be poisonous, the domestic site of toxicity, and women’s private lives, nothing more than a point of fascination.

In Ira Levin’s 1975 film, The Stepford Wives, a young photographer moves with her husband from New York to Stepford, a small town occupied predominantly by married couples. A major part of her awakening to the nature of her surrounding comes by way of fashion: all the women in this town look good, but at the cost of total vacancy. When her best friend throws away her crop-tops and hot pants for a floor-length pastel dress, she’s affirmed in her suspicion: something is wrong. The nursery colors of the Stepford attire, the demure sunhats and the ladylike gloves, merge moral purity with both motherhood and girlhood into one disturbingly hyper-feminine ensemble. Gingham dresses indicative of the good wife, the chaste daughter. Everything ruffles. Lace, at once sexual and pure (the word lace from the Latin word for ensnare, entangle—"laced with"). In collections from both Spring/Summer 2018 and Fall/Winter 2018, this same foreboding kind of femininity was prevalent, a viscous parading of gendered clothing. Maryam Nassir Zadeh’s Stepford revival. Or more aggressively, Margiela Couture's Fall/Winter 2018 baby blue ruffled nightie, spliced open and paired with sci-fi protective goggles, leaving the impression of a femininity that has cracked under the pressure of maintaining itself, and is now stalking vengefully in its tatters.

These pastels connote the nursery (birth), but also the hospital (death and illness): hazardous materials bags in pale pinks and blues, the chalky pearl of latex gloves, the bathroom soap, antibacterial pink, spoon-fed medicine in a baby yellow shade. There is a visual sweetness that wants to obscure the realities of being human. When feeling is translated into women’s fashion, and this palette and texture cut into clothes, the look embodies both pathology and the pathologized simultaneously—a sort of Marilyn Monroe mad scientist, Freud meets Faye Dunaway. It is a femininity that seems exaggerated and clinical, an American Horror Story camp portrayal of woman meets institution in an age-old showdown.

Simons’ attached himself to Julianne Moore’s character for his Calvin Klein 205W39NYC Safe collection, a woman who suffers from “multiple chemical sensitivity,” or “20th Century Disease.” She is allergic to her new furniture, to her perm, to almost everything about her conventional suburban life. (Indicative of her desperate need to reconnect to her humanity is her insatiable thirst for milk). Simons’ alluded to the film by presenting a collection that hybridized visual tropes of femininity (fur coats, sheer fabrics, long ruffled skirts and dresses in gingham and plaid, quilting, crochet) with protective gear (reflective stripes, big boots, Mylar blankets and gloves). Consider Kelela in Simons’ full nitrile look in an editorial styled by Corey Stokes, one finger raised in a silencing gesture. She looks prepped for an apocalyptic dinner date, the photography pulling us back to Missy Elliott’s prime, with her shiny vinyl Hazmat-chic puff suit in the afrofuturistic “The Rain [Supa Dupa Fly],” another moment that felt, in fashion, both like dressing in preparation for a nuclear doomsday, and standing up in a world that had already been inhospitable to so many.

And let’s stay on Missy’s black vinyl which has been everywhere, both last season and into now. Horror fans Kwaidan Editions produced a long skirt and blouse, a belted trench. The lady has taken herself out with the trash. Versace, Valentino, Helmut Lang, Wales Bonner, Sies Marjan, and Priscavera all showed pieces in this plasticky garbage bag material. It’s the inky mirrored black of Scarlett Johansson's devouring otherworld in Under the Skin, Michelle Pfeiffer as Tim Burton’s Catwoman in a latex suit sewn to her body (so exactly that she couldn’t go to the bathroom), and then brushed with silicone paint to maximize sheen. Catwoman’s creator, Bob Kane, says he dreamt her up because he felt women were like cats: “You always need to keep women at arm's length. We don't want anyone taking over our souls, and women have a habit of doing that.” The mixture of fear and sex contained in both costume and character (whether played by Eartha Kitt, Pfeiffer, or Halle Berry) is exactly what provokes Catwoman’s appeal in the eyes of the men who made her, the complicated cocktail that eternally clouds the distinction between empowering and oppressive modes of dress.

And then there’s Possession purple, a blue-purple I can’t separate from Isabelle Adjani, from that notorious subway scene in which she gags, pukes, bleeds, leaks from every orifice, her groceries going all over, milk smashing and running down the walkway. It is in this heavily referenced scene, she later explains to her husband in the film, that she had miscarried—"What I miscarried there was Sister Faith, and what was left was Sister Chance," which feels to me like a self-preserving disavowal of the past and a turn towards the future. Adjani suffered PTSD from the role, needing years of therapy to pull herself out of it, and Tumblr reblogged her image ad infinitum, because her character’s ability to lean into her darkness so viscerally converted her into something of a fashion icon. Purple abounds on the runway, the same 70s shape of Adjani’s high-neck, long-sleeved, mid-calf U-Bahn dress appearing in collections from Haider Ackermann, Miu Miu, and Kenzo. At Sies Marjan, the show was set on a glowing purple stage, the textures, palette and mood of the collection a pulmonary sort of pretty—a gesture towards what’s inside. It’s as if women’s fashion is in the process of miscarrying its past.

One of my favorite recurring trends from last season was the plastic-wrapped, sealed-off luxury seen at Chanel and Marine Serre, or in Virgil’s Spring/Summer 2018 Off-White x Jimmy Choo laminated floral stiletto. For Fall/Winter, Alessandro Michele’s Gucci models wore mesh garment-bag capes on top of their prom dresses and second-wave suits. These protected styles feel related to the eerie, retro, unused (in disturbing contradiction to its name) "living room" of the affluent and anxious, to the plasticity associated to the housewife. It’s like a dress that never leaves its dry-cleaner’s cover, or a couch which lives forever under a plastic slip, an object simultaneously exuding both perfection and the physical impossibility of that perfection. Design under quarantine. It’s similar to the perpetual resurgence of pyjama dressing, an important aspect of this cinematic, ironic return of the hyper-feminine, recalling a vintage stay-at-home glamour, a woman compelled to entertain, to be elegant and seen, but who remains enclosed by the domestic, ultimately alone with her thoughts and her poisons, a pocket for cigarettes, a drink.

Classically gendered pieces are now holding the baggage of what they have historically symbolized: at Helmut Lang, a ruched satin slip dress is done in an arsenic shade, Balenciaga’s neon nylon sock bootie made bulbous, mutated. At Charlotte Knowles Fall/Winter 2018 there were mold prints, Scheele’s green pencil skirts, gloves, and handbags. It was a collection that hinted at decay, peppered with a shade of Undark neon that brings to mind the Radium Girls who contracted severe poisoning painting watch faces in American factories, instructed to point the tip of the brush with their lips for precision, lacquering their nails with a glowy green paint they were told was harmless. This fashion moment feels like a return to the event in order to contradict it, a remapping of an era with a retroactive vengeance. The toxic woman avenges herself by spilling over in the clothes that have formerly fettered her, the new mode of femininity encompassing a confrontation with exactly that.

Olivia Whittick is an editor at SSENSE. She is also managing editor at Editorial Magazine.