Spring/Summer 2021  Ready-To-Wear

By: Sharon Jane | • March 14, 2021
A woman is wearing a black t-shirt and a long colorful skirt

The time has finally arrived to embrace a new season, a new equinox, and a new solstice filled with hope for the best being yet to come. With nature around us awakening from the autumnal slumber, we start to see it stirring jubilantly with new songs and blooming all around us with invigorating scents, colors, and warmth. As we savor the nature around us and every moment we are with it, we also are inspired to enjoy the great outdoors with what we wear.   

Whether you have welcomed more comfort into your wardrobe or used this time to excitedly experiment with new styles and combinations, Spring/Summer 2021 Ready-To-Wear has come in full force to inspire us to take things to the next level, preparing us to go outside and to go all out.                       

For this season, some of the top trending styles include exuberantly vibrant color palettes, finding inspiration from the past and welcoming the future, classic infallible denim on denim combos, laser sharp cutouts, romantic silhouettes and breezy textures. 


  • 1. Romantic Silhouettes: 


Like the sweet floral scents blooming around us, the warmer clouds swirling above us, and the seemingly illusory beauty that comes with Spring, most Spring/Summer 2021 Ready-To-Wear looks channeled this unmatched romantic beauty of the season with dreamy silhouettes, optimistically pastel palettes, danceable ruffles, delicate sheer fabrics, floral motifs, and ultra-femme details such as bows, embellishments, lace, sparkly sequins, and baby-doll puff sleeves - all being a girly-girl’s paradise. 

From Alexander McQueen’s sensational puff-sleeves, Chanel’s pink head-to-toe looks, Carolina Herrera’s sheer detailing, Armani’s bow tops, Moschino’s marionette Audrey Hepburn-esque princess gowns, Tomo Koizumi’s 3-Dimensional floral textured A-line dresses, and Dice Kayek’s perfectly pink baby-doll mini-dress - romance is in the air with some of the looks seen for this season.


  • 2. Denim on Denim


Unfazed, infallible, and completely and classically uncomplicated: Denim on Denim is unfalteringly a Spring/Summer 2021 staple. Loungewear may have been our best friend for Autumn and Winter, but all throughout this season’s Ready-To-Wear collections included countless denim combinations and denim-like colors. 

The timeless jean was seen in a variety of textures, layers, washes, cuts, trims, shapes, and so much more for endless inspirations. Some of the designers that showcased this trend include Burberry, Balmain, Alexander McQueen, Dolce & Gabbana, and Isabel Marant among many others. 


  • 3. Breezy Textures         


Spring has arrived with a need to switch out of our cozy structured pieces and into more easy breezy looks with airy fabrics that flow with the wind and feathers and fringe that move as we move. These breezy textures, fabrics, and silhouettes swayed their way into Spring/Summer 2021 Ready-To-Wear. As the elevating heat invites us to embrace the beloved great outdoors, some of the garments from this season have prepared us for this. These textures that were seen parallel palm trees swaying to a tropical summer breeze and the fabrics used move weightlessly in harmony with the spring air. 

Chanel included feather detailed dresses and skirts, silky capes, and flowy floor-length sheer dresses, Saint Laurent included an A-Line cape-like sheer dress with a feathered hemline, Valentino had a fringe-caped classic black midi-length dress, Bottega Veneta included the season’s iconic fringed knit oversized purse, and Azzaro showcased a goddess-like golden floor-grazing dress with cascading ruffles and butterfly sleeves.


  • 4. Colorburst!


Spring has for years on end been known symbolically and literally as the season for rebirth, new beginnings and opportunities. It is the time where flowers start to bloom and in turn sparkle an endless variety of invigoratingly vivid colors everywhere we go, leaving behind the frigid foliage shades of autumn and winter neutrals. This season’s Ready-To-Wear was inspired by this to include extra-sensory staple pieces featuring a kaleidoscope-like variety of colors and combinations.

Prismatic, magical, jovial and almost nostalgic - for this Spring/Summer 2021, we certainly saw playful and colorful combinations, brightly color-blocked looks, as well as some far-out graphics. Fearless, adventurous, and serotonin-boosting - these colorful looks were probably inspired by our being at home more thus inspiring us to experiment with outfits, play around with our closet and even a bit of DIY or perhaps because wearing our neutral-colored loungewear has become a bit too routine. Whatever the reason, we will not question that these colorful looks are definitely trending for Spring and Summer and the fact that this trend brings a smile to our faces. 

Let’s brighten up our day and maybe even someone else's with looks like Chanel’s neon lights graphic printed asymmetrical dress, Miu Miu’s candy-striped polos, Versace’s surf-ready kaleidoscope tops and ocean inspired neoprene-like ruffled skirt, Alice + Olivia’s vibrantly color-blocked and ruffled maxi-skirt, and Dolce & Gabbana’s patchwork blazer-dress and boots.

The designers mentioned are just some of the many that opted to create looks that bring a bit of rainbow goodness to anyone having a gray stormy day.   


  • 5. Cut-it-out


Designers have been predicting what post-Pandemic styles are to look like and they expect them to be even more glamorous and sensual. This was channeled with lots of unashamed laser cutouts for a more cutting edge touch to any look. Perhaps the inspiration came from the increasing popularity of DIY since this pandemic or the yearning to step out of our homes and into the outside world, like a butterfly coming out of its cocoon, with a bang - garments featuring cutouts are for sure a must for Spring and Summer. Some of the labels that included these cutouts into their designs are Alexander McQueen, Off-White, Versace, Brandon Maxwell, and Fendi.


  • 6. The Future meets Vintage 


This season’s styles showed us that there is no time like the future - and the past. With looks that ranged from each end of the time spectrum with 50’s princess gowns, 60’s A-line color-blocked mini dresses, 70’s disco-fever inspired outfits and 80’s voluminous shoulders to modernistic and impossibly gravity-defying shapes, other-worldly color combinations, dystopian-like silhouettes, and infinitely seam-less and achromatic pieces - this season escaped the present and took inspiration from the past and also freely dreamt and expressed what is believed the future will look like. Some collections took us on a journey, traveling throughout time to past romanticized eras to surpassing the final frontier and into tomorrow and beyond with a perfect alchemy of yesterday’s nostalgia and the hauntingly intriguing future. 

As fashion constantly looks for meaningful inspirations to create collections, it sought to look into what is most precious today: time. Perhaps while being at home we reminisced about the good old days or worked hard to build a wonderful and hopeful tomorrow filled with new memories and adventures - fashion reciprocated this feeling, these emotions, and channeled the past and the future in its collections. Some designers that channeled the past include Gucci, Moschino, Valentino, Junya Watanabe among many others and those that dreamt about the future include Balmain, Brandon Maxwell, Alexander McQueen, and Carolina Herrera among many others.

INSIDE THE MIND OF GENE S. JONES

By Colleen Richmond • July 16, 2025
The Art of a Life Well Lived

AMERICAN MONA LISA

By Georgette Gouveia • July 16, 2025
When John Singer Sargent unveiled Madame X at the 1884 Paris Salon, the reaction was swift and scandalous. Think red carpet wardrobe malfunction meets art world takedown—only this time, it was a jeweled strap that slipped and a reputation that shattered. “It may be the best thing I’ve done,” Sargent mused when he finally sold the portrait to The Met in 1916—just months after Madame X herself passed away. Visit The Met in Manhattan today and you’ll find the oil on canvas beckoning at the culmination of the museum’s “Sargent and Paris” exhibit. There she stands, gazing out over her ski nose and left shoulder, right arm resting on a table, her slim figure torqued in a velvet bodice with a sweetheart neckline and jeweled straps over a bell-shaped satin skirt. Her pale skin glows against the dark fabric, her left hand clutching a fan, a diamond crescent in her upswept hair. Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau) has been many things to many people. As a symbol of chutzpah, failure, perseverance, and reinvention, it mirrors the country that claimed both subject and artist. Quite simply, it is America’s Mona Lisa. Much of the drama behind Sargent and Gautreau’s grand mis-fire has already become art-world lore. The dazzlingly talented, well-traveled Sargent arrived in Paris at 18 to study under portrait maestro Carolus-Duran and train at the École des Beaux-Arts—just in time to befriend Claude Monet and brush shoulders with the early Impressionists. But Sargent wasn’t chasing avant-garde fame. He wanted prestige and commissions, and for that, the Salon was king. What he needed was a muse—a showstopper to launch him into the stratosphere. “It was less a portrait and more a provocation, and society pounced.” Enter Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau —a woman seemingly plucked from the pages of an Edith Wharton novel. Born in New Orleans and raised in Paris after family tragedy, she married a wealthy banker 21 years her senior at just 19. But Amélie—always the main character—soon carved out her own identity in high society. With a flair for fashion, ghostly pale skin (thank you, arsenic-laced cosmetics), and a swirl of whispered affairs, she became a living ornament of the Belle Époque . Sargent was, frankly, thirsty. “I am a man of prodigious talent,” he boasted to a friend, hoping word would reach Gautreau. Basically: Have canvas, will flatter. Gautreau, though—bored by the reality of sitting for a portrait when she was busy with her daughter, mother, staff and social calendar—proved an elusive subject. Still, both persisted. She believed it would be a masterpiece. She wasn’t wrong. Just early. The crowds came to gawk—and gasp. That infamous fallen strap practically screamed, Oops, did I do that? It was less a portrait and more a provocation, and society pounced. Gautreau’s pallor and pose sparked outrage. Her mother wept. Gautreau begged Sargent to remove the painting. He refused. He did, however, repaint the offending strap into a more respectable position. But as Valerie Steele of FIT reminds us, the strap wasn’t doing the heavy lifting—literally. The dress’s sculpted bodice did all the work. The fallen strap? Pure stagecraft. The real scandal was structural: a gown so daringly engineered it made undergarments obsolete. Gautreau wasn’t your textbook beauty. Today’s red carpet queens—Blanchett, Theron, Henson—have recreated the look with more symmetry, more sparkle. Even Nicole Kidman struck the pose for Vogue. But none matched Madame X’s eerie allure or that thrilling sense of poised defiance. She wasn’t just dressed to kill—she knew exactly the room she was walking into. Sargent, bruised but unbowed, decamped to London the following year, where he became one of the most sought-after portraitists of his time. Gautreau? She kept posing, kept dazzling, and let the critics tire themselves out. Sargent may have idealized her, but he captured something deeper: Gautreau’s brazen delight in breaking the rules. That sideways glance? It’s not demure. It’s defiant. A century later, Madame X still whispers, Let them talk.

BROOKE, UNBOTTLED

By Colleen Richmond • July 16, 2025
Brooke Shields is stepping into her power like never before, proving that confidence, vibrancy, and self-discovery don’t come with an expiration date. With a haircare brand rooted in community, she’s not just cheering on women 40+—she’s walking with them.
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