Look fun and get things done in winter’s glam utility trend

Practical but fantastical, glam utility prepares you for anything from a party to a pub crawl to a walk in the park, says Marie Kelly.

When the world makes no sense, fashion often retreats to nostalgia, so it’s no surprise that we’ve yet to reach peak Y2K influence. For the festive season, the millennium take on ‘utility chic’ is back but with bells on, reimagined as ‘glam utility’ and taking cues from this year’s curated chaos trend, summer’s Brat vibe and the current fixation with high low dressing. Sounds a bit crazy? Yes, well that’s the point. 

Design houses are creating an alternate reality because according to business forecaster Forbes, successful luxury brands don’t simply need to sell a product these days. Now more than ever, they need to create an experience, a story, a world that audiences want to be part of. Glam utility is that world; it looks fun but allows you to get things done. It’s practical but fantastical. It prepares you for anything from a party to a pub crawl to a walk in the park. 

It’s also a touch defiant, questioning traditional style codes, turning away from standard dichotomies and demonstrating that unlikely pairings can produce magical partnerships. It’s a poignant message if you believe, as Simone Rocha does, that “Fashion is a reflection of the times, and right now is very emotional.” Fashion is a reflection, yes, but it can also be an antidote, and a means of escape, if only for a festive evening or two. 

The times are emotional, so the trend is unruly and rebellious. Glam utility is the antithesis of Gwyneth Paltrow’s exquisitely curated quiet luxury, which we’ve been steadily sold over the past couple of years. TV show Succession has completed its run and so has the minimalism of stealth wealth, which no longer feels relevant. Move over ‘clean girl’ aesthetic, audacious and unapologetically brazen embodies the current fashion mood. So forget about the tame cotton combat pants and cute satin camisoles you remember of early noughties girl band All Saints, 2024’s glam utility is sexy sequins with a shirt and tie, bra tops with boyish blazers, delicate paillettes with preppy polo tops; it’s two complete opposites that unexpectedly make a harmonious whole. 

If any design house can make tension look tempting it’s Dries Van Noten. It maintained every inch of its signature elegance while delivering one mesmerising juxtaposition after another.

It’s the industry’s attempt to make some sense of the disorder and disorientating reality of life as we now know it. The AW24 runway shows were certainly an exercise in confrontation, no more so than at Simone Rocha, who presented what Vogue.com described as “a finely designed duet between the spectres of sex and death”. Mourning and romance were the two polar opposite reference points for her collection and they yielded an exquisite exploration of how combinations based on difference can be the most exciting and fruitful. Neat fitting polo tops with embellished hoods that snuggly framed the face acted as a foil to supersexy corseted mini skirts. It was protective and aggressive all at the same time.

Italian house No.21 aptly named its AW24 collection Anarchical Glamour and it featured such paradoxical pairings as sheer bodysuits with fairisle knits and sweetheart cocktail dresses with leather derby shoes. A black sheer shirtdress worn with a slouchy collared cardigan played out the kind of enticing tension that formed an undercurrent to so many of the autumn/winter shows. 

If any design house can make tension look tempting it’s Dries Van Noten. It maintained every inch of its signature elegance while delivering one mesmerising juxtaposition after another. An elaborate lavender silk duchess satin jacket looked adorable against denim, a tangerine satin puffer worked oddly well with elegant wide-leg trousers and a neat-fitting grey bomber sobered up a glitzy burgundy sequin skirt. It was exuberant, eclectic and very wearable. Van Noten’s colourful tinsel-like sweaters are a glam utility fan’s best friend. On the runway they were styled with deconstructed shirts, playing formal suiting off frivolous partywear, but they’re also a simple way of achieving the glam utility look when worn over a pair of barrel-leg jeans. 

Stella McCartney’s regenerative cotton denims heavily embellished with silver popper detailing are a one-stop shop for the trend because glam utility isn’t only about power pairings. An absolute highlight was Dries Van Noten’s athleisure co-ord reimagined as a luxuriously draped skirt set. Like McCartney’s dazzling jeans, this was a masterclass in sartorial subversion and elevating the everyday in a single sartorial scoop. 

While pairing hard with soft, proper with erotic and utilitarian with utopian is nothing new in fashion, this season’s glam utility moment feels more boundary-breaking and intentional than before, especially because it crosses the gender divide. Menswear designers embraced feminine tropes fully, tossing aside tired masculine formulas and making glamour the main event with utility its second act. 

At Dior, Kim Jones’s collection was inspired by Soviet ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, an unlikely muse for a man’s winter wardrobe, which is usually a sturdy serving of authoritative overcoats and resolute silhouettes. Jones stated plainly that this collection was about “contrasts”: denim jackets with bedazzled collars, precisely tailored pants with transparent diamanté tops and ballet flats with anoraks. Ludicrous but lovely. Northern Irish designer JW Anderson, meanwhile, explained that in his menswear offering, “Everything is off”. At his namesake label, he served up an incongruent mix of sheer tights with tuxedo shirts, casual sweaters with ornate corsages and knitted shorts with padded edging. This was utility glam at the curated chaos end of the spectrum. 

While pairing hard with soft, proper with erotic and utilitarian with utopian is nothing new in fashion, this season’s glam utility moment feels more boundary-breaking and intentional.

At Loewe, the Spanish luxury house Anderson creatively directs, the vibe was similar, but the clothes poles apart. Tail coats strangely made equal sense of ballooning cargo pants and floor-pooling floral skirts, while oversized buckles looked more like weapons than embellishments.

Festive fashion is as heavily influenced by spring-summer trends as it is by autumn-winter given it falls shortly after the September serving of new-season collections and this offbeat, irreverent mixing of aesthetic codes remained a preoccupation across the fashion capitals. At Burberry, dresses in washed silk were anchored by serviceable overcoats, while an oversized washed-out parka acted as a sensible counterpoint to a shimmering aquamarine dress beneath. Again, No.21 offered one of the freshest takes on glam utility with the simple but unconventional addition of skinny striped scarves to tiered chiffon shifts, strapless babydoll dresses and sequin cocktail gowns. Creative Director Alessandro Dell’Acqua admitted he was railing against “fashion’s predictable conventions”. 

At Prada, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons were concerned with the “unpredictability” of humanity. They responded with the house’s signature eccentricity, but it was even bolder and brighter than usual. Erratic combinations like a metallic dress with space-age mirrored circles worn with an unremarkable yellow rain jacket had a chaotic creativity that perfectly represented the disjointed and fractured nature of 21st-century living. “We wanted not to critique but to…open a dialogue inspired by our cultural moment,” said Miuccia Prada. 

This cultural moment has become more disconcerting and unsettling as we’ve moved through 2024 and the September shows were symptomatic of that. Dubliner Sean McGirr’s second collection for Alexander McQueen took the ancient folkloric figure of the banshee as its muse – the supernatural being who wailed and screamed to warn of impending death. McGirr presented a rougher version of glam utility in the shape of a battered leather jacket over the softest chiffon and a spectacularly glamorous gold jacket that was in fact constructed out of screws and nuts for a fascinatingly literal take on the trend.

Even Victoria Beckham, known best for polished sophistication, had a more subversive narrative than usual in both her autumn/winter and spring/summer shows with the introduction of new house codes such as twisted hardware on diaphanous gowns and sexy silhouettes constructed around fierce metal wires. 

Stylist Jan Brierton is a glam utility devotee, explaining: “It’s my resting fashion pace.” Beckham’s abstraction of embellishment and boning appeals to Brierton as she’s a huge fan of hardware on clothing, even straightforward zips and buttons – anything that brings an edge and moves the fashion dial further away from our lockdown loungewear past. A super-fan of Dries Van Noten, she’s coveting the brand’s velvet cargo pants and slim-fit sequin bomber. 

“My advice to any woman shopping the look is not to stick exclusively to womenswear. Men’s bomber jackets and overshirts can give a contemporary polished look a more utilitarian feel. Visit army surplus stores and rework an old jacket by stitching sequin patches onto shoulders,” she says. Brierton also loves Cos’s parachute jackets and a khaki cotton dress with ruching currently available from Parfois. “The colour and fabric of this piece hint at utility but styled with a flat studded pump, the whole look is elevated. Khakis and muddy browns look beautiful layered, but inject a bright accent colour to lift them,” she adds. “I love neons, but reds, oranges and pinks can look really strong.”

The key takeaway is that glam utility balances the bewitching with the banal so if you’re at a loss, simply throw on that scruffy parka you bought when Kate Moss first made them famous over your best dress. Even if you don’t fully nail the glam utility trend, you’ll look very Oasis Live ‘25.

This article originally appeared in Irish Tatler, November 2024