This glorious fabric has been a feature of every catwalk season since 2013
Somewhere between John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the luscious, black-clad Madame X (1884) and Margaret Thatcher’s wedding gown with matching blue muff (1951), velvet lost its way. A fabric that once stood both for flamboyance and status – it is no coincidence Henry VIII liked the stuff so much – became bloated and stuffy. What had looked fabulously decadent became twee and tame, the stuff of soft furnishings and little girls’ Sunday best.
Velvet has its mojo back in a major way. Major, because this isn’t one of those trends that comes out of nowhere and disappears two weeks later. The trends that truly permeate real life – the move from skinny jeans to sportswear at the weekends, for instance, or the death of the knee-length skirt (still mourning that one) – tend to make slow, steady headway, until one day you look around and realise they are everywhere. Velvet is that kind of trend. It has been a feature of every catwalk season since 2013, when there was a gorgeous Christopher Kane dress with slashes of skin visible between panels of navy velvet, which felt like the first velvet dress in a long time to have the attitude of a pair of ripped jeans. At Victoria Beckham’s New York show last month, the crushed velvet peppermint dress was the piece everybody wanted.
Related: What I wore this week: super sleeves
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