In Their Own Words: 35 Designers on the Fall 2023 Season (2024)

As the fall season progresses across the globe, Vogue editors are speaking to designers pre-show, backstage, by phone, on Zoom, and over email in order to arrive at a nuanced understanding of the collections, and to “take the temperature” of the times. A close reading of the reviews reveals that designers are hyper-focused on creating garments that speak to wider audiences, and in a way that meets their evolving needs for “real-life” wardrobe options for work and play. At a time when distinguishing real from fake is challenging, there’s a desire for authenticity; designers are distilling their personal experiences into their work. In addition, deconstruction—or more accurately—reconstruction was top of mind as creative teams worked with existing materials and built bridges between past and present. Below, some words of wisdom from designers’ themselves.

“I wanted to return to the source...nothing,” the designer said through Adrian Joffe. “I wanted to use fabrics that existed without thinking about making proper patterns, just basic patterns, free.” Joffe continued: “She thinks it is really good for the world if we go back to our original source and start again. To try not to f*ck it up again. Basically that’s the feeling.”
— Rei Kawakubo, Comme des Garçons

“A little serious.... I like to embrace that in this moment. Maybe I’m too careful about what’s happening around us, but I can’t leave fashion like some place of nonsense. There’s some excitement and sexiness there. But basically, I think we have to dress for thinking. And for starting fresh.”
— Miuccia Prada, Miu Miu

“I wanted to go back to the cut and shape of the clothes, to concentrate on the perfect little black dress, the perfect black suit.”
— Donatella Versace, Versace

“There are no gimmicks, no messages, no overthinking. “It’s clothing with no strings attached.”
— Guram Gvasalia, VTMNTS

“Why do I make clothes? Because they’re our companions, and there’s more to them than just air kisses. I don’t know if I make clothes that people need, or if I make clothes that need people, or if I make clothes for the people that I urgently need to need the clothes that need them…What I do know is that today we need less and less clothes that are needless.”
— Francesco Risso, Marni

“We are surrounded by fireworks and all this craziness—social media—but at the end of the day we go back to quality…to understand the future you must understand the past, and this collection is clearly an homage to the house that I am working for.”
— Olivier Rousteing, Balmain

“It was looking at anatomy, the anatomy of tailoring. Almost back to the beginnings of McQueen on Savile Row. It was a progression, which starts very kind of straight and structured. And then it begins to flash and twist and turn upside down. It’s like how you begin with a garment—you have to know that there’s a way to construct it, the bones of it, before you can dissect it and subvert it.”
— Sarah Burton, Alexander McQueen

“I needed to have a show because I need to move on. I need to liberate myself—through my work, and what I do, and put it out there.... And this whole situation really just confirmed to me that it cannot be about that [theatrics] anymore. I love doing that. But I don’t love doing that more than making clothes and I felt like I needed to put this in focus. It came together with something that truly represents me as a designer. I feel like this is the message I want to give: This is who I am.”
— Demna, Balenciaga

“I wanted something which was about how do you kind of reconcile the past, and how do you deal with what you have done, because ultimately the job of a designer is going through a series of rejections of things. And it was really nice to kind of work out ways in which you could break everything. And maybe improve on them.”
— Jonathan Anderson, JW Anderson

“Fashion, has an expiration date, whereas things without expiration dates are uniforms.”
— Daisuke Obana, N. Hoolywood

“Nothing is created. Everything is transformed. To love is to repair. It must be simple. We are repaired, we are reused…. We are restitched, we are re-embroidered…”
— Marine Serre

“For us in the hood, an heirloom was getting a fur, maybe some shoes or a bag. I have tech jackets that I’ve had from like the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s, and god knows when else, and they’ve been passed down from hand to hand.... That for me is beautiful, it’s sustainable, that you can have pieces that people hustled for and they can share it.”
— Raul Lopez, Luar

“Things which you have to mend, tying things together again, because they’re nearly falling apart, but you do it because you still love them so much. Things that are part of your personality. That’s really the essence of the collection.”
— Dries Van Noten

“There’s so much leather and feather and fur on the runway, especially in winter, and I just wanted to show that you can do it in a different way. You don’t have to kill anything.”
— Stella McCartney

“This season there was a want for a certain kind of hardness,” Mike Eckhaus said. “There’s a kind of moodiness, not in a pessimistic way, but maybe on edge, an uneasy feeling that we are curious to play with,” Zoe Latta continued. “We’re thinking of things that come together and come apart, and letting things be mutable as garments,” Eckhaus said.
— Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, Eckhaus Latta

“That’s my job, to present the most excellent aesthetics I can. I know I’m commonly referred to as dark. I think no, I’m just realistic and I’m acknowledging the beauty and horror of the world. There are some people that prefer something more sugar-coated, and that’s fine, I don’t criticize that. But I prefer something with more nuance.”
— Rick Owens

“Mainly what I care about now is to give importance to what is modest, to value modest jobs, simple jobs, and not only extreme beauty or glamour.”
— Miuccia Prada, Prada

“I like to lean into the radically plain. I feel like that’s the next zeitgeist that I want to capitalize on. I feel like everything right now is just so synthetic and acidic and frenetic.”
— Elena Velez

“Maybe elegance is something we have no sense of today. Maybe we don’t care about it. Maybe it has some other meaning, or maybe it has no meaning at all. But I really wanted to bring that idea of being dressed.”
— Anthony Vaccarello, Saint Laurent

[Villaseñor said that some in his team had advised him to disrupt—aka “f*ck up”—his retro urge with shots of modernity...but he had declined.] “Because the most f*cked up thing is where I walk out after and I’m not a guy who comes from here or this. There’s no silver spoon.”
— Rhuigi Villaseñor, Bally

“I wanted it to feel like an exploration of imagination and feeling. There’s a sense of everything being so fraught right now, everything you read is so based in scary real things. I wanted to counterbalance that with something that felt out of this world.”
— Joseph Altuzarra, Altuzarra

“In the future, and already, AI is such a big part of design. I like the perverseness of going against that. Instead of following the AI trend I want to follow this idea of it being super hand, super off: how mistakes are going to be the new luxury.”
— Matty Bovan

“It’s about the collapse of society. What I envision people wearing at the end time.... Low-key we’re literally in the last fight between life and tech. And I feel like a lot of corporations are gaining massive power over a lot of things.”
— Mowalola Ogunlesi, Mowalola

“What’s real? is a huge question, the modern question.”
— Carly Mark, Puppets & Puppets

“Why is a woman’s body a question of everything? Why is it exploited so much? It’s always a topic: what should she wear? What shouldn’t she wear? This is my little dance of revolution towards actually possessing your body back.”
— Dilara Fındıkoğlu, Dilara Findikoglu

“I wanted to challenge the concept of traditional femininity and beauty and twist it, I don’t think women want rules anymore.”
— Tory Burch

“It was also a way to think about myself. Because in my house, my mother and grandmother were independent women who had come through the Second World War.”
— Maria Grazia Chiuri, Christian Dior

“I was ridiculed for [a sweater my mother made me]. Because of that trauma at school I became conscious of clothes, and I started designing so that I could maybe find some approval.”
— Ryota Murakami, Pillings

“The main reason I started is that I just didn’t see the clothes that I wanted to wear. I felt very specifically that the lesbian body hadn’t really been considered as much and, when it had throughout the ’90s, it was commodified. I’m interested in going much deeper, and in offering something else while not being too didactic about it.”
— Sara Lopez, A--Company

“I started thinking of [my experiences and those of] pretty much everyone in my community or around me. I think we all had this relationship with clothes when we were kids before really knowing that gender existed or that there were certain rules and norms.”
— Alejandro Gómez Palomo, Palomo Spain

“What we want to represent is an attitude and a culture, and from that you access the brand and the products. To be able to have a chance to be part of the conversation and represent my culture on the international stage, that’s why I’m doing fashion.”
— Yang Li, Shang Xia

“Every season we try to answer that question, but without saying it. This season the difference is we own it. But French style belongs to everyone.”
— Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton

“I’m trying to give another face of fashion… I’m trying to give something real. Most of the time people are focusing on their own face. I think we should maybe take a little step back and the street is the space that we can all share.”
— Lamine Badian Kouyaté, Xuly.Bët

“The idea of the strange encounter—people that you meet in the street and they really amaze you. It’s a place where everyone belongs, where there is absolutely no hierarchy.”
— Matthieu Blazy, Bottega Veneta

“We’re just trying to work as hard as we can and then also making sure that we are spreading our hands as wide as we can to try to bring as many people as possible with us.”
— Téla D’Amore, Who Decides War