Fashion Review: Tom Ford Leads the Streetwear Resistance

It’s a tough game to have to put on a fashion show in the current extreme news cycle. Especially when that show happens to be the first one of New York Fashion Week. You’ve got to make a pretty good case for your own relevance.

Tom Ford could not have known he would open the spring 2019 collections hours after the Trump resistance in the White House tipped its hand, but it was a pretty sure bet something big was likely to happen.

So it was a smart idea (and a lucky coincidence) he started with some resistance of his own.

“I feel that fashion has somehow lost its way a bit, and it is easy for all of us to be swept up in trends that have lost touch with what women and men want to actually wear,” Mr. Ford said in notes emailed after his show. The front-row presence of Henry Golding — the newly minted “Crazy Rich Asians” heartthrob and probable fashion week most-invited, who donned a sleek white dinner jacket and black bow tie by Mr. Ford to take his seat between Anna Wintour and Cardi B — presumably being an indication of Mr. Ford’s own in-touchness.

However, where Mr. Golding’s appearance might have suggested a look forward — or at least a keen sense of the current moment — Mr. Ford’s clothes seemed like nothing so much as a step back: to the beginning of his own career at Gucci in the mid-1990s, when Carine Roitfeld, the French stylist-turned-magazine-editor, was his muse, and his women ruled the C-suite in pencil skirts and stilettos.

There were pencil skirts galore this time around, too — ruched tight at the thigh or flyaway at the hem, flashing just a bit of lingerie lace, like a promise, at the knee — under strong-shouldered faux crocodile suit jackets, all worn with metal spike heels, all often caught at the waist by tough leather corsets. There were men (mostly as accessories to the women, in complementary shades) in gleaming, narrow silk suits and geek sleaze square glasses. Otherwise, there were very few trousers, unless in a tux. There were a lot of neutrals: black, beige, lilac, white. There was some leopard, especially for evening, over lavish silk fringe. And capes billowing off the shoulders of slinky dresses.

But what was really interesting was what there was not: athleisure or streetwear. There was not a sneaker in sight.

No sneakers! Be still, my beating-hard-because-I’m-on-a-treadmill heart.

This was not casual dressing. It didn’t even look like it placed a terribly high premium on comfort (certainly those shoes did not), one of the catchwords of recent seasons. Sure, some of the fabrics were stretchy, but not in a yoga-way — in a trussed-up-in-silk-jersey way.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Recently Mr. Ford’s collections have swung between a kind of overwrought decadence and a neon disco/aerobics rabbit hole, greased by the rise of the workout wardrobe. It’s something of a relief to see a designer stop chasing the chimera of the athletic world.

But while this was very much a return to form, it’s an old form — a definition of power that relies on hobble skirts, chopped and changed le smokings, and the boardroom/bedroom trope. (The men’s wear, less fraught, was also less dated.) Once upon a time, that was exactly what people wanted. Mr. Ford gave it form, and it made him famous.

In the context of today, however, when hurtling toward the next crisis and needing to turn on a dime are among the few constants, and when a revolt against the establishment may be in the offing, it seemed less like a solution than a well-executed, occasionally alluring, exercise in nostalgia.