Squint and spring 2023 looks like a Y2K reboot full of slip dresses, lace details and mesh separates so far as the attention can see.

And data will surely confirm the “lingerie and sheer on repeat” sentiment coined by La Samaritaine’s Victoria Dartigues right after Paris Fashion Week.

In response to fashion search engine Tagwalk, 59 percent of the 247 designers who placed on shows through the fashion month included lingerie and a whopping 77 percent included transparent looks of their spring 2023 collection.

But seeing all this as solely ‘90s nostalgia or a “turn of the Millennium” redux is oversimplification, in line with observers.

For Tiffany Hsu, Mytheresa’s vp, womenswear and kidswear fashion buying, this latest iteration is a component of an overarching movement celebrating the feminine form.

“It’s women dressing for themselves and celebrating their female power,” she noted, declaring the recognition of styles designed to spotlight the feminine form in a way that’s “very sensual and sexy without being vulgar.”

Tasteful execution and a scarcity of sexual charge are essential, agreed 2021 LVMH Prize winner Nensi Dojaka, who believes the spring 2023 runways brought back an concept that originated within the ‘90s, where “there was lots of transparency and in some way it was far more accepted.”

Showing the body “began more as a trend, continued and is becoming an announcement of empowerment and making the feminine body ‘acceptable,’ as an alternative of being either scared [of seeing it] or sexualizing it,” said the London-based designer.   

After many years of feminist struggles and an increased deal with making public spaces safer for girls, more revealing styles echoed the sentiment that “you’ve got the appropriate to be who you might be and this doesn’t give others any rights on you,” concurred Laurence Dekowski, director of the lingerie and youngsters’s wear departments at Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche.

In her opinion, this signaled an empowered consumer, now not beholden to style prescriptions or notions of age, and who takes these looks to the road, styled for daytime, as an alternative of limiting them to partywear or evenings out.

That’s a novel twist, too. Somewhat than coming from solely from designers and their shows, “influence and agenda is driven by the road reasonably than the reverse,” noted Dr. Carolyn Mair, behavioral psychologist, business consultant, and creator of “The Psychology of Fashion.”

“A method of taking a look at it’s that individuals are more confident about their bodies,” she said, noting that once-narrow definitions of physical beauty have been mostly blown out of the water.

At a time where “everybody feels that they will have a spot at the style table,” saying “you’ll be able to only wear a lingerie out when you’re ‘body beautiful’ will not be going to chop it anymore,” Mair continued.

“Pride is step by step becoming central to fashion. Pride of bodies, of their differences and their multiplicity,” agreed Paris-based designer Alice Vaillant, whose two-year-old label Vaillant hinges on clingy transparent looks and lingerie details.  

Nudity is an act of reappropriation, needed to “reclaim our bodies against those that use them for their very own interest,” she continued, especially coming from her “generation, that refuses to be pinned down [and] celebrates diversity and different femininities and masculinities.”

This echoed the underlying idea behind the 2014 “Exposed: A History of Lingerie” exhibition at Museum on the Fashion Institute of Technology, that recast undergarments as shapers not only of the feminine body’s appearance but in addition female demeanor.

“The issue is so not a lot [showing] the body of girls as [seeing] it with the gaze of the dominant, the male gaze,” continued Vaillant, who considers that pride and self-assurance is a tool for emancipation but in addition as a vector for change.

With seduction and sexuality pushed to the side, Mair reads body-baring styles as a phase in a person’s style, with the cursor positioned by other cues akin to how they present themselves, their overall wardrobe and even cosmetics.

Take younger generations for whom fidgeting with fashion is about “verifying their identity, to navigate who they’re on this planet that they exist in,” she continued.

And that world is grim. Beyond signifiers of individuality, these lightweight looks carry “the gravity of our times,” noted fashion historian and Palais Galliera curator Alexandre Samson, be it geopolitical uncertainties, over two years of the COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictions, the rise of maximum ideologies and attacks on women’s reproductive rights.

He outlined a genealogy that encompassed the spring 2023, Ester Manas’ debut, earlier works of Atlein or Ottolinger, the transparent interplays seen in Casey Cadwallader’s Mugler and beyond to Stella McCartney-era Chloé, Chantal Thomass within the ’80s and the cutouts seen in Loris Azzaro’s work within the ’70s, and his dresses “made for sexual liberation.”

In his opinion, this aesthetic is “a mirror of the culture that marked the start of globalization of fashion,” viewed with cynical hindsight as incoming generations begin to digest that era with two-plus many years of distance.

“Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, this proposition was beginning to emerge,” he continued, echoing the data-driven view offered by Tagwalk, where the “transparent” tag emerging as a relentless among the many top tags used to explain spring collections of leading brands since 2017, foreshadowing the return of underwear as outerwear.

As governments tighten controls, difficult norms through clothing could also be a option to show agency and freedom of expression another way.

Faced with “forces of regression,” consumers and designers may very well be reacting through extravagance and lightness — of textiles and silhouettes — speculated Dekowski.  

“Once we lacked control, we attempt to take control each time and wherever we will, and we will definitely do this with clothes — if now we have the boldness to hold it off,” Mair said.