Recently I was sitting at a café and there was a girl at a nearby table and I immediately had the instinct to talk to her.

And it was not because of anything she did, or an inviting expression, it was literally just because of how she was dressed.

She had on a long camel coat, slightly oversized, with a cream knit underneath and tailored black trousers. Her hair was pulled back in a low bun, very simple, and she had these small gold hoops. Also a pair of dark sunglasses sat on the table next to her.

It was far from over the top for a cafe, but it felt very considered.

And I remember thinking “she either has somewhere to be, or she just understands how she wants to move through the world.”

It made me realize how quickly we make decisions about people before they’ve said anything at all. Before you speak, people have already adjusted how they’re going to interact with you based on what you’re wearing and you see it in small ways.

How close someone stands to you or whether they approach you at all.

And it made me wonder how often that’s happening to me without me realizing it. So here is what I believe clothing communicates before you even speak.

Whether you feel approachable

There are certain outfits that can create a bit of distance without you having to do anything.

If you walk into a space in darker tones, heavier layers, something slightly oversized, people often give you more space. There’s usually a pause before they approach, if they approach at all.

If you’re in something lighter, more fluid, or softer in shape, people tend to feel more comfortable coming up to you. The interaction starts a little more easily.

You’re influencing that tone before you’ve even looked at anyone.

How seriously people take you right away

You can say the same exact thing in two different outfits and get two different reactions.

When your outfit has structure (pieces that hold their shape, cleaner lines, a sense of intention) people tend to assume you’re more certain in what you’re saying.

If your outfit feels more relaxed or closely tied to trends, people take a second to read you before fully engaging.

That shift happens quickly and it changes the way conversations unfold.

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Every era of fashion produces at least one, stubborn designer who seems to resist the mood of the moment. In the late twentieth century, when fashion reveled in the pageantry of logos, glossy excess, and the triumphant return of glamour, Jil Sander stilly built an empire out of restraint and while everyone else was busy shouting, she was whispering. And people actually seemed to listen.

Part of the fascination with Jil Sander is that her clothes never begged for attention, yet they changed the way people thought about modern dressing. Editors often reached for the word minimalism. Minimalism suggests an emptiness of some sort, but Sander’s work was never empty, it was quite deliberate.

There is something architectural about it. You sense the mind of someone who studied structure before ornament. When a Jil Sander coat appears on a runway, the first thing you notice is the line and then the fabric and then…decoration, but it almost barely enters the conversation.

To understand where that discipline comes from, it helps to look at the context that shaped her.

Some History on Sander

Jil Sander was born in Hamburg in 1943 during wartime Germany. Her childhood unfolded in a country that was rebuilding itself materially and psychologically. Postwar German culture favored clarity and order over flamboyance and a certain aesthetic seriousness took hold. You can see traces of that mentality in architecture, industrial design, and eventually in Sander’s fashion.

She studied textile engineering before entering the industry, which already sets her apart from designers who approached fashion primarily as an expressive art. Engineering of course trains the eye to think about materials and structure in a unique way and later she worked as a fashion journalist in the United States, where she observed the industry from a critical distance before entering it herself.

In 1968 she opened her first boutique in Hamburg and the timing here matters. Fashion in the late 60’s and seventies was becoming increasingly experimental — color, pattern, and youth culture dominated the conversation and Sander responded by editing rather than amplifying.

Her work soon became recognizable for its clean tailoring, neutral palettes, and unusually high-quality fabrics.

Looking at her designs through the lenses we have been exploring this month (faith, innocence, and moral suffering) reveals how philosophical her system of fashion actually is.

Faith: Belief in Structure

So let’s start with Faith. Faith, in Jil Sander’s work, appears via the belief that if the structure of a garment is correct, nothing else is required.

Consider her famous white tailoring from the mid 1990s. This look generally consisted of a clean blazer with a precise shoulder and a straight, fluid trouser, with no visible branding, no decorative buttons, and certainly no theatrics. The suit relied entirely on proportion.

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When people talk about Cristóbal Balenciaga, they often describe him with extreme reverence. There are designers who rarely agreed on anything, but they seemed to agree on him. Christian Dior called him “the couturier of couturiers” and Coco Chanel once said that most designers were simply dressmakers compared to Balenciaga.

That kind of respect developed in response to extreme discipline on the part of Balenciaga.

Balenciaga approached clothing the way an architect approaches structure. He cut fabric with the precision of someone who believed that garments could carry meaning beyond decoration and his silhouettes often felt calm, deliberate, and controlled, even when they were radically new at the time.

I’ve been thinking about his work through the three lenses that we’re exploring this month: faith, innocence, and moral suffering. When you study Balenciaga through those ideas, his designs truly feel like a philosophy expressed through fabric.

A Seamtress’s Son

Cristóbal Balenciaga was born in 1895 in Getaria, a small fishing village on the northern coast of Spain in the Basque region. The environment he grew up in was modest and practical. His father worked as a fisherman and his mother supported the family as a seamstress.

As a child, Balenciaga spent long hours watching his mother cut patterns and sew garments for local women. Those early observations became the foundation of his technical skill and he began to understand clothing from the inside out long before he became a designer in any formal sense.

There is a well-known story from his youth that captures his confidence in design. As a teenager, Balenciaga approached the Marquesa de Casa Torres, a local aristocrat who spent summers in Getaria. He asked if he could copy one of her elegant dresses. She agreed, likely expecting an amateur attempt. Instead, he recreated the garment with such precision that she became his patron and helped support his training.

From there, Balenciaga apprenticed with tailors and dressmakers across Spain. He absorbed a wide range of influences: Spanish court dress, traditional Basque garments, the austerity of Catholic liturgical clothing, and the dramatic silhouettes seen in paintings by artists like Velázquez and Goya.

By the time he opened his first fashion house in San Sebastián in 1919, he already possessed an unusual level of technical mastery and his reputation grew steadily in Spain among aristocratic clients. Then… history intervened, as it does.

The Spanish Civil War forced Balenciaga to close his Spanish houses in the 1930s and he relocated to Paris and opened his couture house there in 1937. The move placed him at the center of European fashion at a pivotal moment when the industry was being reshaped.

Other designers quickly recognized that he operated differently. Balenciaga could cut a pattern, drape fabric, and construct garments himself whereas many designers relied heavily on entire teams of technicians. But Balenciaga remained deeply involved in the physical creation of his designs.

This ability gave him unusual authority over silhouette and he was truly the architect behind his ideas.

Silhouettes of Faith

Faith appears in Balenciaga’s work both visually and philosophically.

He grew up in deeply Catholic Spain, where religious imagery shaped architecture, ritual, social interactions, and clothing. Liturgical garments, with their vertical lines and controlled volumes, created an atmosphere of solemnity and order and those forms greatly influenced Balenciaga’s design language.

You can see this influence in the 1951 semi-fitted suit. The lines were clean, restrained. The shape followed the body rather than exaggerated it and the overall effect felt so composed rather than seductive.

Even more directly, several of his evening gowns from the 1950s and 1960s echoed ecclesiastical vestments with their high collars that framed the face and long sleeves that extended the silhouette vertically. Decoration in this work was so minimal.

The wedding dress he designed in 1967 for Queen Fabiola of Belgium also illustrated this sensibility perfectly. The dress was austere in its simplicity with, again, long sleeves, a high neckline, and a clean silhouette in replacement of the elaborate embellishment often associated with royal weddings. The result felt serene and monastic.

Balenciaga’s tunic and chemise dresses from the late 1950s and early 1960s also reflected this philosophy where you had these garments that created space between the body and the fabric. The silhouette fell from the shoulders rather than clung to the waist or hips.

Faith, in Balenciaga’s work, often appeared as discipline. And he once described the ideal couturier as someone who must be an architect for design, a sculptor for shape, a painter for color, a musician for harmony, and a philosopher for measure. The statement reveals how seriously he approached his craft.

There is conviction in that approach.

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Let’s talk about Vivienne Westwood. The Vivienne Westwood.

Before she became a dame of the British Empire, before museums archived her corsets and platforms, before fashion houses softened her edges for mass consumption, she was in a small shop on King’s Road in the 1970s selling clothes that made people deeply uncomfortable.

Safety pins, bondage trousers, slogans that did not whisper. She understood something that still makes institutions uneasy:

Fashion is political whether you admit it or not.

Passion Without Apology

Our February theme begins with passion and Westwood embodies it in its most intellectual form. Her work is emotional, yes, but it is also historically literate.

She pulled from 18th-century tailoring, from pirate silhouettes, from Victorian corsetry, from aristocratic portraiture. She understood fashion history deeply before she deconstructed it and that is precisely what made her dangerous.

You can only subvert a system if you understand it and her corsets are a perfect example.

Historically, corsetry constrained women’s bodies to fit a narrow ideal. Westwood reintroduced the corset not as punishment, but as proclamation. Structured, exposed, worn deliberately rather than hidden beneath gowns.

It was a reclamation of form. The body was no longer being shaped for male approval, it was being shaped as armor, as theater, as statement.

Passion, in her world, was less romance and more ideological intensity.

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“I don’t want to do cocktail dresses. I want to create pieces that can be handed down like an heirloom.” — Alexander McQueen

And that, he did.

There is a difference between dressing the body and dressing the psyche.

Most fashion we come across concerns itself with the visible, but Alexander McQueen was preoccupied with what could not be easily seen. His work literally pulsed with emotional intensity. Runways felt charged instead of just decorative.

To look at McQueen is to confront the unsettling possibility that clothing can communicate psychological truths before a single word is even spoken.

So, if February invites us into the terrain of passion, obsession, and the gothic self, then McQueen is our personal guide through that landscape.

Origins: Precision Meets Imagination

Before turning to the spectacle of the runway, it helps to understand where McQueen began.

He grew up in London’s East End, far from the rarefied world of couture, in a working-class environment defined more by endurance than extravagance. Fashion, at least the version governed by Paris and old houses, was not exactly waiting around the corner, which makes his eventual ascent feel almost improbable.

Talent sometimes has a way of ignoring circumstances.

From an early age, McQueen demonstrated extraordinary technical ability. He trained on Savile Row, the epicenter of British tailoring, where precision was like a moral expectation.

Savile Row taught structure, discipline, and respect for the architecture of a garment. Many designers spend their careers trying to master these rules, but McQueen mastered them quickly and then did something far more interesting.

He pushed against them. Not carelessly or for sport, but deliberately.

Technical rigor became the foundation from which his imagination could safely become dangerous.

Passion: Fashion That Refused Emotional Neutrality

To speak of McQueen without speaking of emotional intensity would be to misunderstand him completely.

His runway shows were immersive psychological environments.

Models walked through water, through fire, across mirrored stages that forced the audience into uneasy self-reflection.

One unforgettable show concluded with a holographic Kate Moss suspended inside a glass pyramid, drifting like an apparition. The effect was haunting.

So it became pretty apparent to me throughout my research that one did not just experience a McQueen show with their eyes, their entire nervous system participated.

And this was intentional, obviously.

Passion, at its core, disrupts emotional neutrality. It moves us out of observation and into sensation. McQueen understood that fashion, when taken seriously as an art form, should provoke response rather than polite approval.

Art that leaves you entirely unchanged has likely asked very little of you.

McQueen, as I have come to find, asked quite a lot.

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