About this deal
A tent dress is a dress that hangs loose from shoulder to below the hips, and does not have a waistline. [1] They are worn without belts. Kutesko points instead to Dior’s Trapeze line of 1958 – “a fluid liberation of the body from the cinched waist popular at the time” – and the designers Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto who designed clothes in the 1980s that “didn’t fit clothing to the body, but rewrote the body through fashion, calling for a new perception of beauty that many women really did find empowering”. As for runway inspiration look to designers such as Cecilie Bahnsen, Molly Goddard and Ganni; on the high street Arket, Free People, & Other Stories and Zara (obviously) are our go-tos.
In 2013 the New York Times called this style the “sheltering dress”; Ditte Reffstrup, the creative director of the Danish brand Ganni, who brought the shape to the high street, describes it as “a loud silhouette”; and the internet has spawned the term “baggy con” for the look. The tent dress was one of the trends in 2007. [2] They are sold in most department stores or clothes-carrying supermarkets, and may also be home-made or tailor-made.For Kutesko, the freedom to play with body shape via clothing rather than by hiding it was the key, although she does concede: “It’s hard to generalise because the history of western European fashion is so closely tied to accentuating the female form.” Still, not everyone is convinced that loose dresses are a move away from dictatorial beauty standards. Elizabeth Kutesko, a lecturer in cultural studies, finds this reframing “simplistic, or unconvincing at least”. You could argue this is a different form of power dressing,” says Susanna Cordner, a senior research fellow at the London College of Fashion, who is interested in “fashions that let women take up space in public” – AKA womanspreading. “Clothes aren’t just about fit but also feeling: how it feels to wear them and move in them and how the world around you will relate to you,” she says.