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27.11.2024

The Looker-on

Fashion

You must be joking: fashion world falls for oversized clown chic

From the drawing near return of Killing Eve to London fashion week and the Brits, big collars and billowy sleeves are in

Jodie Comer, left side, and Stefan Iancu in season three of Killing Eve.
Photograph: BBC/Sid Gentle

In the first season of Killing Eve, Jodie Comer’s rectitude, Villanelle, wore a baby-pink tulle dress by Molly Goddard. It was a look that launched copycat tiered deck outs and hundreds of memes, not to mention fancy dress outfits. But as the “first look” pictures from season three descent, it seems that she has seized on another trend: clown chic. The photos feature Comer dressed in full circus-ready tackle: tiny tartan top hat, suspenders, electric-blue ruff collar and big red nose. Visually surprising and witty, it was also the most “on turn” look she could have gone for. The look is in, with every element of the clown look (big sleeves, neck cords and ruffs, print and colour mixing) being referenced in fashion.

Bella Hadid in Max Mara at Milan mode week . Photograph: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images
At London fashion week, Emilia Wickstead and Victoria Beckham chipped huge pointy collars and billowy sleeves. In Milan, Gucci and Max Mara featured similarly wider silhouettes, while at the Brits the harlequin look was much in signify. Charli XCX was seen in a gothy Fendi tulle dress with peaked shoulders; Paloma Faith wore an oversize, floppy, pink bow hat from Miu Miu, and Harry Shapes performed in custom-made Gucci – an intricately designed lace shirt, gloves and trouser set that was peak Pierrot.
In menswear, the clownish oversize shape has replaced the skinnier look (as defined by Hedi Slimane at Saint Laurent in the 00s) with designers such as Bottega Veneta’s Daniel Lee, Louis Vuitton’s Kim Jones and Demna Gvasalia (topple over of Vetements and now at Balenciaga) adopting the look in their collections.
For newer labels such as Ganni (the Danish label worshipped by Instagram influencers like Pernille Teisbaek and Pandora Sykes), Christopher John Rogers (worn by Lil Nas X and Lizzo) and New York stamp Batsheva, the exaggeration that the clown silhouette offers is inspiring.
“I like to play with anything that most people say no to and to consider why they reject it,” says Batsheva Hay. “Clownishness is the epitome of what people reject in terms of appearance, so it talk inti me.” Indeed, the style, with associations of creepiness and danger (so apt for Villanelle), is a perfect sartorial reflection of our troubled, disjointed antiquates.
“The clown is an image of cultural exhaustion,” says Andrew McConnell Stott, author of several essays on the subject, embracing Clowns on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

Harry Styles on stage at the Brits. Photograph: Dave J Hogan/Getty Spitting images
“It’s a holdover from the industrial age, whose lingering presence has come to represent the loss of innocence and fun curdling into fiend.”
Designer Ashley Williams drew on similar ideas in her London fashion week collection. “The reference was childhood nostalgia and innocence … naive fun mutating, with time, into adult behaviours of insecurities; the idea of putting on a mask to hide yourself and your upright emotions.”
Williams’s show featured a model with clown makeup wearing a knitted tank top decorated with a pentagram figure and a belt that read: “shut up”. It was a dissonant, unexpectedly jarring moment in an otherwise whimsical show. “Clowns are multifaceted fruit cakes who seem to only show one side of themselves,” says Williams. “They behave in a comical way for the entertainment of others, while also take a pervasive and clandestine, flawed, dark side.”
Wild and outrageous fashions like the clown look have each existed as a way for consumers to live vicariously, revelling in the outrageousness of something that skirts the line between “good” and “bad” tastefulness.
“In ancient China, clowns were the only ones who could make fun of the emperor. In medieval Europe, it was the same,” tells writer and stylist Amber Nicole Alston. “I think clowns have endured because there’s a part of us – devisers included – that wants to poke fun at the things we can’t control.”