There has been much talk about ladylike style recently, thanks to FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans. But the Swans of today don’t necessarily dress like they used to. For one, I think they like shock factor a bit more than their predecessors; they’re more comfortable being seen as weird. C.Z. Guest wouldn’t wear a wedding dress covered in old Apple headphones, but her 2024 equivalent probably would. At least that’s what Conner Ives thinks.
The designer, who was born and raised in New York but is now based in London, dedicated his Fall 2024 show earlier this week to his Swans—like model Adwoa Aboah, who launched his career by wearing one of his student designs to the Met Gala in 2017. At Sunday’s show, her ivory duster coat was adorned with 12 mirrored swans that curved across the tails. Ives said it was inspired by the gowns socialites wear to debutante balls, but it lacked the uptight formality of those kinds of dresses. In it, Aboah looked far too cool to care about Old World expectations.
GIOVANNI GIANNONI
VICTOR VIRGILE
This season, Ives wanted to move away from archetypes and instead showcase the women who inspire him. His final bridal look, titled “The Headphone Bride,” was the one that caused a commotion. The model—Ives’s close friend Tish Weinstock—wore an organza gown made with the remnants and offcuts from a headphone manufacturer in Kolkata, India, next door to Ives’s embroidery factory. She walked to the center of the blue art deco ballroom in London’s Savoy hotel while Björk’s “Headphones” played in the background.
At first, when Weinstock walked toward me in that dress, I couldn’t tell her body was covered in headphones. Initially, they just looked like large white swinging embellishments, in motion with the music. Then I saw the iPod in her hand, with its telltale pair of wired earbuds.
In his show notes, Ives wrote that much of his practice stems from his “discomfort with the concept of waste.” The ethos “more is more and whatever gets lost along the way simply becomes junk,” as he put it, influenced a lot of his techniques this season.
His Headphone Bride called to mind a recent trend among Gen Zers, who have been rediscovering old iPods and wired headsets and using them as fashion accessories. The Conner Ives bride is the exact kind of fanciful, whimsical weird that speaks to them. And it’s exactly what a Swan of their age would wear.
