Wanda Nylon (Q2196)

Backstage at her Wanda Nylon show, Johanna Senyk was busy recounting the exact moment she realized the inspiration for her Fall collection—diversity, or more accurately, the lack of it. “I had looked at my Spring runway show, and I was shocked,” Senyk recounted. “The show . . . there was no diversity at all. I thought to myself, ‘What have I become? Bourgeois?!’ ” We’ll keep class out of it, because that’s a whole other thorny subject, but it is safe to say Senyk has been a pioneer in her generation in Paris in terms of representation, early on in her career embracing all kinds of beauty on her runway, whether she was using professional models, her coterie of friends, or the girls she found on the multicultural streets of Paris. It’s particularly apt to be thinking about all this right now, and not just because of what’s playing out on the global political stage (least of all France, with its presidential election months away and the specter of a far-right nationalist party all too very much present). The last day or so has also seen all sorts of charged questions raised about the whys and wherefores of how designers cast the women who walk their runways. Bravo to Senyk for addressing last season’s shortcomings—and tackling them head on.The other thing she revisited, after Spring’s more whimsical (stylistically, at least) offerings: her usual idea of dressing a strong woman. It is par for the course for designers to talk about this mythic empowered figure, of course. Yet Senyk’s is a real flesh-and-blood creation, because, really, she’s her very own best role model—trading in a very real and present idea of female identity and sexuality without recourse to ridiculous fantasy. For Fall, she visited the idea of the women of the Black Panthers, hence the berets, but there was no cringe-worthy (at best) appropriation of Black Power beyond that. Instead, that was the starting point for the idea of dressing women who live with purpose and conviction and need practical clothes, such as voluminous easy to move in jumpsuits, neatly tailored back-pleated and topstitched coats, and tapered denim jeans cropped to just above the ankle. She then mixed those with pieces that purely and simply crackled with the energy of fashion, such as a flowing platinum lamé dress over matching pants, a styling idea that started way back during the New York shows, or a Crayola-vivid yellow fleecy coat adorned with silver disc buttons.