Confusion onion layer numero dos: What do women have to do with any of this?

I’m not American, but Anderson’s debut at Dior made me feel like one. In the sense that I finally understand what it’s like to be trapped in a space split by two opposing parties bickering at each other. As I proudly waved my pro-Dior flag on Notes by declaring, “I don’t care what the internet says, I’m a Dior girl now,” and observed the heated post-election-level discourse, I noticed something interesting — the critics who liked it were mostly women. The ones who called it “meh”? Mostly men.

Men who will never wear the clothes they have such violently strong opinions on. One even wrote — and I quote — “there’s nothing desirable there.” I’m sorry, but the math is not mathing. Later, deep in a Substack comment section (don’t ask which one, I blacked out halfway through), I realised I was arguing with, you guessed it, men again. And I thought — what am I even doing here?

The same pattern occurred with the much-talked-about Duran Lantink’s Gaultier debut: women wept; men said, “Um, chill, Gaultier himself did crazy shit before, remember?” Oh, we remember. But with all that, Gaultier made his woman theatrical, quirky, confident and unapologetically hot, all while playing with gender in a chef ’s-kiss-clever way. We looked at her and thought — I want to be her. We saved our money to buy Gaultier to be her. We hunted every thrift store in Paris for those iconic mesh tops to be her. Instead, we got? Dick leggings. Thanks.

For a brief moment, I asked myself the dreaded question: Have I become a boring prude? Was this my Duchamp “Fountain” moment — the urinal that also split the world in two? The fear of not being on the progressive side of history crept in for a second. But no. Something much deeper felt off. Then, the Gods of the algorithm led me to Bonnie Langedijk’s piece in HURS, “Is Fashion Afraid of Powerful Women?”She wrote:

The Spring/Summer 2026 fashion week season has concluded, and with it, any lingering illusion that fashion exists primarily to serve the women who wear it. What we witnessed across the major capitals was male fantasy masquerading as empowerment, constraint dressed up as liberation, a profound misunderstanding of what women actually need from the clothes we inhabit daily.

And then she dropped the mic:

But here’s what fashion refuses to acknowledge: there is a difference—a vast, unmistakable difference—between designing for women and designing at them.

This. This is why Lantink’s Gaultier debut felt like a sexist joke at a classy dinner party. Apparently, he told Rachel Tashjian, the fashion critic for The Washington Post, that he “knew exactly what he was doing.” Okay, the nerve is cute. But unfortunately, I can’t wear the said nerve and feel great in it. Also, I know an art-school-level project when I see one. I, too, have stapled fabric to a mannequin in my CSM days and called it a statement.

Here’s the thing: Christian Dior adored women so much he wanted them to feel beautiful after the horrors of WWII. Coco Chanel adored women so much she freed them from corsets. Jean Paul Gaultier adored women so much he dared them to unleash their raw sexual power. Even Demna, with his meme-core extravaganza at Balenciaga, clearly adores women — he makes them look sexy, alien, and alive, without crossing into mockery.

Because love, reverence, and respect always show — whether in a hemline or a headline. So while Anderson’s Dior might not be everyone’s cup of matcha, at least the respect was there.

Confusion layer numero tres: “We Worry Too Much About Rich People” — do we, though?

Then, divine guidance led me to Rachel Tashjian’s latest Substack piece, “We Worry Too Much About Rich People.” In it, she writes:

One, we act as if these people (and they’re mostly women, which I think is notable — because we find it very easy to say what women think, which is crazy) are going to fall down at the door of the Avenue Montaigne boutique if they can’t find a jacket or a shirt they want to buy at Dior. Women are not helpless creatures yoked to the whims of French fashion houses.

Buying expensive clothing is not the same as buying skim milk: If you don’t like the goods at one place, you just go to another. There are at least 10 fashion houses with couture ateliers that make extraordinary clothes with unbelievable craftsmanship.

Here is my diss track:

Okay. But what about the aspirational woman? The one who spends money she doesn’t have to buy into the vision of the house, not just the product? Rachel’s essay is a great example of how fashion journalism often treats women’s emotional investment in fashion as a frivolous attachment rather than a meaningful relationship. I’ve been noticing this for a long time — critics talk about “the client” as if she’s some faceless oligarch with unlimited Amex credit, and never about us — the women keeping fashion emotionally alive. The dreamers. The believers. The women who choose vintage Tom Ford Gucci over a week of groceries. Because, according to our twisted girl math, it feeds us more.

Also, aren’t we all exhausted by the whole “eat the rich” rhetoric? We get it, capitalism sucks, wealth is unevenly distributed, but that’s not the conversation here. The point is not pitying billionaires. It’s asking why fashion journalists seem to forget that behind every brand identity is a woman — actually millions of them — trying to build her own in a world that really doesn’t make it easy.

Tashjian also says: “One of my least favourite fashion-criticism tropes is house codes. I don’t know what that means or why anyone cares”.

WOMEN CARE.

Because once again, this neglects the emotional architecture of fashion. We want to connect to the essence of the woman the brand is channelling. We build our wardrobes around who we dare to be today and who we’re daring to be next. When we look through the runway looks, we ask ourselves:

Am I a Comme Des Garćons artsy weirdo?

Or Blazy’s Chanel woman — elegant, rich, untouchably calm?

Am I Anderson’s modern and mildly quirky Dior lady?

Am I an Incazzata or a Ragazza in Demna’s new Gucciverse of archetypes?

Etc., etc, etc.

And yes, I very intentionally titled this piece after Madonna’s song, “Do you know what it feels like for a girl?” Because she was fierce enough to ask that question in a cone-boob corset designed by… who? That’s right. Jean Paul Gaultier. Maybe that’s the real punchline: the male critics, the Substack threads, the “client commiseration crisis” — they still don’t get what it feels like for a girl.

In Conclusion: Dear Fashion, Do You Even Like Us?

We think in memes now. Even collections get reduced to reaction gifs before they’re deeply understood. And let’s be honest — women, too, have been memeified. Against our will. We’ve become the punchline. The aesthetic. Clean girl. Mob wife. Indie sleaze. Tomato girl. You name it. Each season, a new costume. Each Pinterest trend — another cage.

The internet screams a cacophony of opinions, emotionally detached critics scream theories, the runway screams spectacle and — oh, fatphobia is back in fashion, apparently. The noise is so loud that it’s getting progressively harder for us women to hear ourselves. Meanwhile, the economy’s unstable, the world still runs on male design — literally and structurally — and yet we’re told to “just buy somewhere else.” It’s exhausting to the point of me personally having actual conversations with my female friends about starting a commune in Costa Rica, drowning our phones in the ocean and living off the land. We laugh, but deep down we know it’s not funny.

So yes, when someone like Matthieu Blazy gives us Chanel that’s calm, sensual, and actually wearable, we exhale. Because for a moment, it feels like someone’s speaking to women again — not yelling at them. At us. That’s all we want: dialogue instead of noise. Reverence instead of ridicule. Clothes that see us — not clothes that meme us. Is that too much to ask?

Dear fashion world: hire more women. Let us speak for ourselves. Let us design for ourselves. We need more women in charge — at the sketch tables, at the fittings, in the boardrooms. Because the discourse is so loud, it’s drowning out our intuition. And dear brands, please don’t forget that we don’t just want to look good. We want to feel understood.

Because, unfortunately, what it feels like for a girl right now is this: sometimes the only rebellion left is a pair of patent boots that scream, “I take up space unapologetically.”

That’s all.

(Yes, in Miranda Priestly’s voice.)