Girls and the trend for ill-fitting chic

http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/fashion-blog/2015/jan/15/-sp-girls-season-four-the-trend-for-ill-fitting-chic

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Girls, HBO’s sparky, dark coming-of-age series returned for a fourth season on Monday, and with it Lena Dunham’s artfully shambolic, famously ill-fitting wardrobe: unflattering, rumpled and reflective of a certain lifestyle.

The series has always stood out for disrupting the aspirational norm of US sitcoms with its great script, grey morals and having not one but four hapless leads. But while Dunham’s wardrobe was originally devised with laughs in mind, the ill-fitting look has recently starting to ripple out beyond the small screen, graduating from uniform of the hapless to uniform of the hip. We’re calling it ill-fitting chic.

The show’s costume director, Jenn Rogien, is to thank for this. Rogien’s reasoning was always self-explanatory: the clothes reflected the mood and Hannah was a mess. “In the first couple of seasons, we were paying a lot of attention to reflecting how scattered Hannah was through the fit of her clothes,” explained Rogien in a recent interview with Fashionista, “and sometimes that was in a hem length: too short, too long, hit at an awkward place on the leg. Or we’d play with or drop the waistline to make them hit at not quite the right places, which literally just looks rumpled and off.” (Rogien had the foresight to tap into the physical anxieties of twentysomething girls, instead of alienating them, as per Sex and the City and its inaccessible styling.) But what the look lacked in gorgeousnes, it made up for in coolness, reflecting a certain coveted lifestyle, as fashion historian Amber Butchart observes : “It’s a bit like when you’ve just got up and throw on the nearest thing – your boyfriend’s shirt, something like that – it’s nonchalant.”

London-based, Swedish-born vintage shop BeyondRetro recently launched its own label of customised pieces, Beyond Retro Label. The line started with vintage-inspired pieces but has recently, says head of press Victoria Plum, seen a recent spike in “shrunk” pieces, or ill-fitted chic, not dissimilar to Hannah’s look. “One of the things we noticed was a rise in clothes that had either been cropped or – more bizarrely – pieces that had been purposefully shrunk: knitwear that floated above the bellybutton and flares that were four or five inches off the floor.”

Plum namechecks blogger Natalie Suarez, a long-time wearer of shrunken pieces. On the high street, the same thing is happening at H&M while at Made In Humanity slightly shrunk jeans float an inch above the norm. Even Grazia advises readers to wear flares too short. At the high end, in Louis Vuitton’s current season, flares were cropped, while over in menswear, the weekend’s AW15 shows were full of “hovers” at Topman Design and the Way Perry-styled Kit Neale show.

As to where this shrunk-to-not-fit look came from, Plum is at a loss but it’s certainly reminiscent of Jarvis Cocker, circa Britpop, whose tiny tank tops sent us all charity shopping in the late 1990s. It also mimics the whole anti-fashion, oversized movement also recycled from the 1990s – in spirit, if nothing else. As Plum explains, “[oversize fashion was in effect] about young guys and girls dressing against trends, wearing clothes too short/big because no one wants to look too ‘done’.”

Season four, which started on Monday, was notable for the number of barrettes, but also because the four girls – in particular Hannah, now on her way to a posh writing school in Iowa – had slightly upped their game. As Hannah matured and developed, so did her wardrobe. But no doubt something will go wrong and as her wardrobe reflect this sorry tale, the clothes will start to shrink again.