Move over micro-mini, there’s a recent skirt silhouette taking on this season as designers hopped on the long train for fall, embracing mullet, mermaid and trumpet dresses for evening that added some much needed drama to the season’s mostly neutral utilitarian day looks.  

At Victoria Beckham, the British designer attempted to reconcile the fantasy of Paris fashion and the fact of cultivating her customer. Alongside this season’s more business sharp-shouldered tailoring, “Beckham pushed the thought of playing dress-up with off-kilter silk patchwork pleat dresses adorned with feathers [and] Nineteen Forties starlet gowns and underpinnings,” wrote WWD’s West Coast executive editor Booth Moore, inspired by socialite-turned-eccentric Edith Bouvier Beale, as depicted first within the 1975 documentary “Grey Gardens,” and within the 2009 dramatization starring Drew Barrymore. 

Rick Owens, alternatively, had the work of photographer Richard Avedon on his mind, telling international editor Miles Socha backstage, “I wish that was my dress Dovima was wearing with the elephants.” Anyway, that is my version,” he continued, referring to the sequin gowns matched with big, squishy duvet filled donuts paired with Owen’s now signature monster platform boots.

As usual, “there was a lot of black, including…tube dresses slashed up one side and trailing a protracted, lopsided train that occasionally got snarled within the raised catwalk rigging,” Socha observed on the show. 

For his farewell to Moschino, Jeremy Scott went out with a bang, experimenting with midcentury couture hinged on Eighties punk references. “The show climaxed with a parade of elaborate evening gowns, some sculpted in jewel-toned taffeta, others paved in crystal embroideries,” Socha wrote in his review. 

Equally glamorous dresses mopped up the runways of Givenchy and Balmain where each houses’ designers Matthew Williams and Olivier Rousteing, respectively, dove head-first into the archives.