Inside D.C. Fashion Week

Washington is known for power suits, not power silhouettes. It’s a city where the most daring fashion choice is not wearing Allbirds to brunch. It is a town of navy blazers, sensible flats, and men who dress like their mothers still buy their Barbour jackets. 

Before D.C. Fashion Week, Street’s very own photo editor Jackson Ford and I spent the afternoon rotting on Georgetown’s lawn, counting the number of Adidas Sambas and Barbour jackets absorbing the last of the winter sun. After the show, we took the obligatory postgame Lincoln Memorial walk, standing in front of something oversized and immovable, trying to make sense of what we had just seen.

Inside the walls of the National Housing Center, where one might expect a conference on zoning laws, I lost my fashion show virginity. 

The Cowboy–Boot Industrial Complex
There is something deeply funny about Washington, of all places, becoming the site of an Americana reckoning. Andrew Nowell Menswear came out swinging with a streetwear–meets–Savile–Row aesthetic that felt like what would happen if an English tailor took a gap year in Texas and never recovered. There was grungy, lodge–core fur that wasn’t the sleek, Gwyneth Paltrow–approved quiet luxury fur haunting the Upper East Side. No, this fur felt self–sufficient and slightly violent, like it had been acquired via a trap in the woods rather than a Net–A–Porter sale.

Then there was the leather, animal–print blazer, an outfit for the man in your life who is simultaneously a Wall Street executive and an exiled tiger king. This was not Americana as heritage; this was Americana as deconstruction.

This wasn’t the controlled, Pinterest–friendly cowboy revival we’ve seen on Kendall Jenner or the Bode–wearing finance bros of Tribeca. This was Western wear as dissonance, as rupture—a visual argument about American masculinity in freefall. What happens when the rugged cowboy archetype no longer serves a purpose? What happens when the myth of the American West collides with a reality in which the only people wearing cowboy boots are finance guys and Instagram girls at Stagecoach?

Andrew Nowell’s collection seemed less interested in exploring Americana and more in dismantling it altogether

Luxury is in a state of conceptual exhaustion. The quiet luxury movement has drained excess of its meaning, reducing opulence to a whisper. At the same time, the death of streetwear as the dominant cultural force has left a vacuum in how status is communicated through clothing. If loud logos now feel gauche and quiet luxury has been flattened into nothingness, then what is left? What does it mean to dress with power?

When Fashion is Sovereign
Chiefo! sent out a model who did not look styled. He looked ordained: A towering figure draped in a sweeping white cape, its massive sleeves engineered to command space. Atop his head was a glittering hat, evoking the silhouette of Yoruba fila caps, geometric in structure yet spiritual in presence. It was not just a design choice; it was a proclamation, a visual language of status that predates European tailoring.

The body was left bare; no shirt, only strength, and muscles exposed not as vulnerability but as proof of survival. Draped over him was a sweeping white cape, engineered not for softness but for force, its billowing sleeves extending outward, demanding space. This was not the kind of cape seen in European royal portraits, designed for stillness and posed regality. This was a garment that does not adapt to the body, but rather, demands the body adapt to it.

Yvonne Exclusive Designs took the same approach, turning clothing into armor. Beaded chest plates sat on the body not like jewelry, but like protection—scaled, layered, and designed to absorb impact. The work recalled the Masai and Zulu warrior breastplates, intricate yet rigid, symbols of strength disguised as ornamentation. Cowrie shells, once a global currency before European colonialism decimated their value, were placed deliberately within netted draping. 

It would be easy to frame these collections through the lens of European fashion history—to compare them to the draping of Galliano–era Dior, to find their references within an aesthetic language that remains fundamentally Western. But to do so would be to miss the entire point.

The Call Is Coming From Inside the Clutch
Fashion has spent the last decade negotiating how much it owes the body. Clothing had to flatter, to move, to function, and to present a version of the wearer that was legible to the world. Even in avant–garde fashion, there was always a conversation between fabric and form—whether that was the precision of Thierry Mugler or the movement of Issey Miyake. The body may have been exaggerated or distorted, but it was still acknowledged.

Valenncii Ventora’s collection refused to negotiate. It did not shape the body, or even distort it; it consumed it and turned it into something impractical, obstructive, or outright absurd. It was not just uninterested in wearability: It was anti–wearability. 

A model walked out in a bodysuit with ballet pointe shoes and a red puffer cape so swollen and oversized that it barely moved as they did. The effect was uncanny, somewhere between a Comme des Garçons archive piece and an absurdist stage costume. Rei Kawakubo’s most radical work often centers on clothing as a burden—fabric that rejects the body, sleeves that cannot be lifted, and structures that engulf the wearer like armor or cocoon. Valenncii Ventora took that idea and pushed it further: The cape did not just sit on the model, it dictated how they existed in space.

The bean bag clutch took that philosophy to its most extreme point. At first, it was simply oversized—a visual gag. But then, it grew, bloated, overtook the body entirely, and swallowed the model into its formless mass. Accessories, by nature, are designed to be held, controlled, and secondary to the body. This was an accessory that became the main character, relegating the human insides to an afterthought.

We’ve seen accessories function as sculpture before—Daniel Roseberry’s surrealist Schiaparelli creations, Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe pieces that turn handbags into Duchampian readymades—but Valenncii Ventora rejected that level of polish. This wasn’t sculptural fashion as a refined concept; it was an imposition. 

And then, there was Frida Kahlo’s face, stitched onto denim overalls, layered with a black bolero, a regency–style bonnet, and fingerless gloves. It would be easy to read this as just another instance of fashion pillaging art for aesthetics. After all, Kahlo’s face has been commodified into oblivion—slapped onto tote bags, graphic tees, and coffee mugs by brands that would have horrified her. 

Valenncii Ventora did not present Kahlo’s image in a way that felt reverent or even legible. The overalls—a working–class garment, tied to both American labor history and Mexican campesino identity—were clashing against the prim bolero, the absurdly delicate bonnet, and the punkish gloves. This was not a clean, digestible portrait of an icon; it was disjointed, chaotic, and unmoored from any specific narrative.

The Kahlo industrial complex has turned her into a marketable shorthand for feminist resistance, but here, her image felt destabilized, thrown into an aesthetic blender of historical references with no clear through line, which felt deliberate.

Fashion is obsessed with nostalgia right now, resurrecting Rococo, Edwardian, Victorian, and Regency silhouettes at the same time that it mines the ‘90s and Y2K. But it often does so without interrogating the politics of those eras—why those garments existed, what they meant, who they excluded, and how they shaped the idea of fashion itself.

This look seemed to push that tendency to its most absurd endpoint—a historical collage so incoherent that it revealed the emptiness of fashion’s nostalgia addiction.

We are in an era where designers are increasingly testing how much the body actually matters to the clothes we wear.

Glenn Martens’ work at Diesel has made denim a rigid, sculptural force, often rendering the wearer incidental to the garment’s movement. Balenciaga’s latest silhouettes under Demna are increasingly hostile to human proportions—hunched, aggressive, and structured for some dystopian future body. Ludovic de Saint Sernin’s barely there designs and Mowalola’s extreme cutouts are making clothes that barely exist as protection, where exposure itself is the point.

Valenncii Ventora’s work fits into this new wave of antagonistic design—clothing that is not just impractical, but deliberately difficult.

It is easy to look at these pieces and call them costumes. But costume suggests that clothing must be in service of a role, a function, or an external meaning.

This collection offered no such thing.

The Military Aesthetic Complex
Military tailoring has been stripped of its original purpose and rebranded as a luxury staple, from Prada’s love of nylon to Balmain’s sharp–shouldered militaria. The language of war has been absorbed into the fashion system so completely that it no longer carries weight; it exists as a cool silhouette, a nod to toughness that means nothing. 

Matveeva’s collection was not about aestheticized resilience. It was about resilience as material reality.

A model walked out in a sharply structured, military–style coat in black, its shoulders squared with precision, and its buttons lined with the exacting symmetry of wartime uniforms. The silhouette was immediately recognizable: This was not a designer borrowing from the visual language of war, but someone embedded in the reality of it.

There was no romanticism in these clothes, no styling tricks meant to soften their severity, and no illusions that these were costumes for some imagined apocalypse—because the apocalypse had already arrived.

Other designers have attempted post–conflict aesthetics before—Raf Simons’ early work was filled with survivalist paranoia, Rick Owens has played with militarized dystopia for years, and Demna’s Balenciaga has made the disheveled, crisis–worn silhouette a central theme of his collections. But Matveeva’s approach was not speculative. 

And then there was the flag.

Fashion’s use of national flags has always been complicated. Flags and logos in fashion are often acts of irony (Vetements’ DHL collection), of rebellion (punk and Vivienne Westwood’s co–opting of the Union Jack), or of hyper–commercialized patriotism (Ralph Lauren Americana). 

But here, there was no irony, no spectacle, and no performance. A Ukrainian flag was presented at the end of the collection, not as an accessory or a branding tool, but as a declaration. A simple statement that Ukraine exists, as does its fashion, and neither can be erased.

When fashion critics talk about “statement pieces,” they’re usually referring to a dramatic runway look. But Matveeva’s collection made a different kind of statement: We are still here. 

D.C. Fashion Week didn’t just showcase clothes; it showcased fashion’s ongoing identity crisis. 

Some designers treated luxury as armor, inheritance, something untouchable. Others stripped fashion down to a negotiation between fabric and the body—one that didn’t always end in agreement. Wearability wasn’t just ignored; it was actively rejected.

At the end of it all, there were no clear answers. Just the sense that fashion isn’t interested in being easy anymore.

And maybe that’s the point.