Okay, I don’t want to be a traitor to my generation and all, but I really don’t get how people dress today. To lift another phrase from Cher Horowitz, fashion is coming out of an “ickiness” period, one dominated by home clothes and general dishevelment. If the brassy protagonist of Clueless can teach us anything, it’s that what we wear can be a transformational and purposeful act.
So what a delight it is to see Alicia Silverstone, the actress behind Cher’s cattily wholesome persona, sun-kissed and smiling in Rodarte’s fall 2021 look book and film, alongside Aurora James, Heather Kemesky, and other models. The campy, kitschy teen world of Amy Heckerling’s 1995 classic might seem miles away from the broody gothicism often associated with Rodarte, but Kate and Laura Mulleavy grew up on Clueless. They saw it in theaters in their native California—and then rented it “hundreds” of times from their local video store.
The plaid suits and slip dresses Cher wears in the film aren’t recut one-to-one in the Mulleavys’ fall 2021 interpretation of ’90s style. Theirs has always been a more abstract aesthetic. This season, they started with a bias-cut halter midi-dress in cartoon hibiscus prints or vixen sequins held up with a ribbon bow at the neck. They learned last season that waft-y, comfortable dresses do well—see Selena Gomez and Mindy Kaling in their tea-length frocks—and extrapolated on them with V-neck dresses and flutter-sleeve maxis in a mix of vintage-store pastel florals and grungy black. For going out, they built up their sequined offering, and for staying in they translated their floral prints into stretch dresses, tops, and pants. There’s also a big varsity jacket, an evolution of their popular souvenir style, worn by models of all genders.
One of the crucial lessons of Clueless is that the right outfit can change your stature, your mood, even your life. The Mulleavys understand this, and they imbue that cinematic sense of dressing up for who you aspire to be into their collections. They’re famous for their blancmange red carpet dresses, but the Mulleavys do make clothing for people’s actual, beautiful, and mundane lives. Some might bristle at the sight of stretch pants in the assortment here. “We are thinking about how people want to wear things,” Laura says. “I don’t think I could even design outside of this moment.”
Clueless helped boost the profile of “totally important designers” who, with big-time runways and in-store displays of stretch knit tights, jeans, and T-shirts, transformed the look of ’90s femininity. The Mulleavys have the right idea for how to do that for a millennial generation that dreams big and dresses cozy. Let’s see how they balance it all out on their return to the New York runway this fall.
