12 unforgettable style moments of 2022
This year has been a rollercoaster – and fashion was no slouch in responding to our messy times. It lurched between moods of cosiness and glamour, austerity and extravagance, the futuristic and the nostalgic, the bizarre and the straight-laced.
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It also reeled between the casual and the ready to go out-out, as we teetered between a post-pandemic desire to get dressed up and apply lots of lip gloss, and a more down-at-heel mood, a hangover from all those months in tracksuit bottoms. Put plainly, fashion in 2022 has been a heck of a ride. Here are the items and moments that might help to make some sense of the chaos:
Julia Fox’s amped-up denim
If you were looking for an embodiment of fashion in 2022 you could do worse than look to Julia Fox, the Uncut Gems actor who became a household name – of sorts – this year. Although the competition is strong, one of her more surreal get-ups saw her take a single pair of jeans and cut them up to make a pair of extremely low-slung jeans and one slither of a crop top. By pairing them with an Alexander Wang bag, also made from a pair of jeans – the legs tied together to make the handle – and a pair of knee-high Alexander Wang boots made from… denim, she took the Canadian tuxedo, and amped it up several notches. A perplexing outfit from head-to-toe, it spoke to fashion’s love of someone willing to really run with a look. Julia Fox doesn’t care about “the rules of fashion,” says Katy Lubin, of fashion search platform Lyst. “And [she] has been wholeheartedly embraced by the fashion ecosystem as a result”.
Y2K dressing
Like an alcopop hangover, noughties fashions have continued to be huge in 2022, with Bella Hadid the poster girl as someone inexplicably able to pull off furry hats and wraparound sunglasses. From micro-miniskirts to bare midriffs, cargo pants to cut-outs and sparkly shoulder bags to jeans – the more low-slung the better – all things Y2K were firm favourites. Katie Holmes even had a go at resuscitating the dress over baggy jeans look. Lubin argues that the look is “popular with Gen Z shoppers who are inspired by the golden-era paparazzi shots of noughties it-girls emerging from nightclubs”. The Y2K mood is perhaps best appreciated by those too young to remember it the first time around.
In a dramatic stunt, Parisian brand Coperni sprayed a dress made of a liquid fabric on to the body of model Bella Hadid (Credit: Getty Images)
Bella Hadid’s spray-on dress
“Drama! Technology! Nearly-naked Bella! This well-orchestrated show stunt had all the right internet-breaking ingredients to dominate fashion fans’ feeds,” says Lubin of the moment when Parisian brand Coperni sprayed a dress on to Hadid at its spring/summer 2023 show. It was an innovative meeting of the best minds in fashion and science, with the spray made up of Fabrican, a liquid created from both natural and synthetic fibres. As with many such viral moments, it got that most special of treatments: becoming a Halloween costume. In case you’re wondering, whipped cream doesn’t work quite so well.
Barbiecore
When Margot Robbie was papped taking a pair of candy-coloured cycling shorts for a spin in a scene from the new Barbie film, it was a clarion call for hot pink. Barbie, according to Lyst’s year in fashion report, “has become the underlying style muse of the year”. Barbie pink met its high-fashion cousin, Valentino pink, when designer Pierpaolo Piccioli sent a unique shade of hot, “rampant” pink down the catwalk at his autumn/winter 2022 show. As Lubin tells BBC Culture, it makes perfect sense given the need this year for “some pure fun escapism into a happy bubblegum candy-pink world”. Plus, she says, “hot pink tracks well on social media”.
Audiences were obsessed with the white T-shirt worn by the character Carmen “Carmy” Berzztto (Jeremy Allen White) in TV series The Bear (Credit: Alamy)
The Bear and the white T-shirt
Cited as the “real star” of The Bear, one of the most lauded shows of the year, Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto’s plain white T-shirt might have looked nondescript but, in keeping with all good costume design, it told a story that went deeper than screen-deep. As Groves explains: “Carmy’s blank white T-shirt is seemingly ubiquitous, and hints of the everyman. However, menswear forums were quickly able to identify his T-shirt as having been produced by the German company Merz b Schwanen, which creates its T-shirts using original loopwheeler cotton cylinders from the early 20th Century.” It’s an origin story that speaks “to the character’s obsessiveness over their dress”. It is not the first time the white tee has taken a starring role in popular culture – see James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause or Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. But it is perhaps the first time one has remained so unsullied in a working kitchen.
Second-hand Love Island
When UK Love Island contestant Indiyah Polack wore a second-hand Ann Summers “Sexy Adult Air Hostess” outfit to take part in the mile high challenge in this summer’s show, it proved that anything fast fashion can do, second-hand fashion can do just as well. And it signalled a step in the mainstream-ification of pre-loved shopping, with all the outfits worn by this summer’s cohort of “sexy singles” sourced from eBay. In the month after the show at least, it paid off: the site saw a 7,000% spike in searches for “sustainable fashion”. But it hasn’t all been rosy – fast fashion company Shein was named most popular brand of the year and, according to Vinted’s chief executive, second-hand fashion still represents only 3-4% of the market – proving it needs to become more than just a holiday fling.
The pigeon clutch
Pigeons might not scream “fashion” but when Sarah Jessica Parker was pictured with the JW Anderson 3D-printed pigeon clutch, grotty talons and all, on the set of TV series And Just Like That, the bag sold out across several retailers. It speaks to the potency of SJP, but it also says a lot about our current taste for the kooky. With space enough only for a travel-sized hand sanitiser, it is, according to the Guardian, “a prop, a stunt, a meme come to life. Less a bag and more a main character accessory”. And while this specific bag isn’t an accessory that you’re that likely to spot next time you board the bus, daft, tiny bags are the perfect accoutrement with which to poke fun at fashion – and life (on days when you don’t have library books to return).
At New York’s Met Gala, Kim Kardashian sported an iconic dress that was originally worn by Marilyn Monroe (Credit: Alamy)
Kim Kardashian wearing Marilyn Monroe’s dress
One of the more contentious fashion moments of the year came at the Met Gala, with Kardashian wearing the dress that Monroe had worn to serenade John F Kennedy on his 45th birthday. Kardashian was accused of damaging the vintage Bob Mackie dress which, despite its historical stock, was bang-on a present day trend. As Kardashian told Vogue: “Nowadays everyone wears sheer dresses, but back then that was not the case. In a sense, it’s the original naked dress. That’s why it was so shocking.”
For Professor Andrew Groves of the Westminster menswear archive at the University of Westminster, it was more about a supernatural dimension: “Dress curators sometimes speak of clothing being ‘haunted’ by their previous owners,” he tells BBC Culture. “Through being worn, garments are reshaped, moulded, and even stained, forcing, as the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman noted, the acknowledgement of not only the object present but the body absent.” For Lubin, it was “a Met meta-moment that made us re-think Kim’s stature and legacy as a fashion and cultural icon of our times” – for better or worse.
Big Mule Energy
The artist David Hockney meeting King Charles might seem an unlikely fashion moment – as stylish as the king of swimming pool scenes is. But Hockney’s bright yellow Crocs not only delighted Charles – “Your yellow galoshes! Beautifully chosen,” he apparently commented – they also chimed with the mule-mood music. From Kim Jones sending mules down a catwalk in front of The Pyramids for Dior, to Birkenstocks’ Boston clogs being the most popular shoe of the year on Lyst, this year has been big for backless footwear.
“The popularity of the mule speaks to dress codes being dressed down and comfort becoming a cornerstone of the modern men’s wardrobe,” Jian DeLeon, co-founder of Instagram account Muleboyz, tells BBC Culture. His fellow Muleboy Noah Thomas agrees: “As dress codes continue to change… multi-purpose products are becoming a borderline necessity. This is why the business-in-the-front, party-in-the-back nature of the mule is what makes them perfect for this current climate.”
Rihanna, pictured here with A$AP Rocky at Milan fashion week, gave a masterclass in glamorous maternity dressing (Credit: Getty Images)
The reinvention of maternity style
2022 was arguably the year that maternity dressing finally got yanked into the present day, thanks to Rihanna. The star started as she meant to go on when she “announced” her pregnancy via pictures in which she was wearing a hot pink Chanel bomber jacket with only one button done up, the rest left undone to reveal her pregnant stomach – the garment almost like a theatre-curtain to the main event.
She continued to buck maternity dressing styles. “I’m really pushing into the idea of sexy,” she told Refinery29. “When you get pregnant, society tends to make it feel like you hide […] you’re sexy and that you’re not sexy right now [but] you’ll get back there and I don’t believe in that shit.” From sheer negligee to sharp-stilettos, her wardrobe throughout 2022 has shown that what people wear while pregnant doesn’t have to be all frump.
The micro-miniskirt
The tiny skirt that Miuccia Prada sent down the Miu Miu catwalk at her autumn/winter 2022 show was described by Vogue as vibe-shifting the entire fashion world. It was, says Navaz Batliwalla, founder of Disneyrollergirl.net and author of The New Garconne, “a look we hadn’t really seen since the days of Christina Aguilera circa 2002”. And it “seemed to capture the wider public’s imagination as a reaction to finally being let out of their covid cages. Young people especially wanted to reaffirm their existences,” says Batliwalla, “and showing some skin was a novel way – for them – to do it.”
As with all trends worth their salt, the mini-miniskirt went on to reach its perplexing extreme: enter the beyond-skimpy Diesel skirt-belt. Is it a skirt? Is it a belt? What could be more of the moment than the ambiguity of not being sure?
Timothée Chalamet caused a stir wearing a backless Haider Ackerman jumpsuit on the red carpet – and was also the first male cover star of Vogue (Credit: Getty Images)
Timothée Chalamet in backless jumpsuit
In a look that Groves describes as “reminiscent of a louche rockstar or a modern-day Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, Chalamet wore a backless Haider Ackerman jumpsuit on the red carpet in Venice. In a win for literal dressing, the flesh-baring outfit was worn to promote recent cannibal flick Bones and All.
But his bare back was also a win for the playfulness and sexiness that has been welcomed into menswear of late. As one commentator put it in the FT, Chalamet was doing men a favour with his explicit decorativeness: “Whatever stage we are at in the overthrow of patriarchy, women are still expected to be more explicitly decorative than men, on a big night and every damn day. Chalamet is having a go at this nonsense.” He continued his work when, in October, he became the first man to appear on the cover of Vogue. He looked, if not radically then at least unusually, decorative in a pearl choker.
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