Puffed, gathered, pleated: 2023 was the year of the giant mango (and we’re not talking about the fruit)

When Holly Waddington, the costume designer of “Poor Creatures”, Yorgos Lanthimos’ much acclaimed ghostly film about the psychological and sexual awakening of a young woman that premiered this December in the United States and is due to arrive in Brazil in February 2024, began thinking about what your heroine would wear. She said she was thinking of “thin arms and straight skirts with a big ruffle.”

The film, based on a 1992 book by Alasdair Gray and starring Emma Stone, is set in an unidentified time period that’s a bit like the 1880s — if the 1880s took place in an alternate dimension where time if it folded in on itself, then the past was also the future. That’s partly why Waddington was drawn to a silhouette that was narrow at the top and exaggerated at the bottom.

Plus, it’s “quite phallic,” she said, “and that felt right.” Lanthimos had other ideas. “He said, ‘It’s about the sleeve,'” Waddington recalled. And so, indeed, it is.

Puffed, gathered and pleated to bulbous ends, the sleeves worn by Stone’s character, Bella Baxter, are impossible to ignore. About 40 centimeters wide, they bounce across the screen in every scene like giant hot air balloons or oversized breasts, bigger than your head, absurd and strangely seductive, delicate and dominant. They are “vast,” Waddington said. “Huge.”

But monumental as they are, they are also totally fashionable. “There’s something in the air,” Waddington said. “Yorgos was very in tune with that.” It’s not the marketing tsunami that was Barbie pink; It’s just one of those cosmic moments where fashion and culture collide.

Forget the power shoulder: 2023 was the year of the power sleeve. No matter the exact style—bouffant, bishop, gathered, ruffled, leg of mutton, statement, mega, dramatic—all that really mattered was that it was big. Offscreen as well as onscreen.

According to Daniel Roseberry, creative director at Schiaparelli, “we have reached the pinnacle of mango.”

SLEEVES AND MORE SLEEVES, EVERYWHERE

Style watchers have started talking about a wave of sleeves in late 2022. “Forget what you knew about the statement sleeve,” influential Italian boutique Luisa Via Roma proclaimed on its website. “This season, the style is more dramatic and bold than ever.”

The fall ready-to-wear shows were full of sleeves — trailing the floor at Balenciaga and Rodarte; the size of a bowling ball at Thom Browne; rounded and sculptural at Schiaparelli.

At the Oscars, sleeve craze moved to the red carpet thanks to Florence Pugh, who wore a Valentino taffeta robe with palatial puff sleeves over shorts; Jessie Buckley, in a black lace dress with Shakespearean sleeves by Rodarte; and Mindy Kaling, whose white Vera Wang dress had detachable cuffs.

At the Met Gala in May, Kendall Jenner wore a sequined Marc Jacobs look in which the designer seemed to have taken all the fabric that would have been from the pants and transferred it to the sleeves. Also joining the statement sleeve group were: Michelle Yeoh, Kate Moss and Cara Delevingne.

Then Vogue put Carey Mulligan on its November cover in a peach dress from Louis Vuitton’s resort 2024 collection that had sleeves so intricate it looked like she’d stuck her arms up to the elbow in two large profiteroles. And then came “Poor Creatures” with what Waddington called a “commitment to its sleeves.”

It’s no wonder that in January, the Fashion Institute of Technology museum will kick off its 2024 programming with “Statement Sleeves,” an exhibition of nearly 80 pieces from the permanent collection that will focus on how sleeves serve as “signals of status, taste and personality,” according to a press release. And although they go in and out of fashion, it has always been that way.

THE ARMS AND THE WOMAN

Big sleeves have been a part of clothing for almost as long as clothing has existed. Colleen Hill, FIT’s curator of costume and accessories, who is behind the museum’s sleeve exhibit, said the world’s oldest woven garment — a V-neck linen shirt from the fourth millennium BC, now in the collection from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archeology in London—includes pleated sleeves. During the Renaissance, sleeves were often the most elaborate part of a dress, as well as being removable; grooms often gave mangoes to their new wives.

Sleeves became even more prominent in the Elizabethan, Victorian and Edwardian eras. By the 1830s, there were so many different shapes and names for sleeves, Hill said, that a women’s sewing guide of the time stated, in essence, “we’re not going to give you every style of sleeve because it’s impossible.”

Waddington said that when researching these periods for “Poor Creatures,” she went to the fashion archives and discovered sleeves so extreme they were almost unbelievable. “That’s what fascinates me about historical clothing,” she said. “The shapes are wild.” What sounds like science fiction, she added, actually comes from “a 19th century pattern.”

Sleeves got big again in the 1940s, thanks to designers like Adrian, a Hollywood couturier whose giant puffed sleeves were a favorite of a young Joan Crawford and a precursor to the equally giant shoulder pads of World War II. And sleeves made a famous comeback in the 1980s, thanks in part to Princess Diana and her wedding dress’s enormous fairytale-on-steroids sleeves.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the episodes of “The Crown” that focus on Diana, including the recreation of her wedding dress, coincided with the return of big sleeves. Simon Porte Jacquemus specifically mentioned Diana as inspiration for his fall 2023 show, which featured puffed sleeves. He said he was obsessed with her “dramatic fluffy round sleeves.”

“They shaped her silhouette in a sensual way, but still with a poetic and naive 80s touch,” he said.

WHAT’S IN A MANGO?

At first, it may have seemed like pandemic lockdowns and the rise of comfortable clothing would put an end to big sleeves. But the way altered reality has shrunk our interactions to the size of a computer monitor may have turbocharged the trend.

“We’re so often seen on screen these days from the waist up, and sleeves are a way to stand out,” Hill said.

Waddington said something similar, noting that the torso “is what the camera sees most of the time, so the information needs to be happening between the waist and the head.” And how much better it is when it is broadcast in volume… Or rather, in volumes.

In fact, Roseberry said, sleeves “draw attention upward to the face and to the person wearing the garment.”

No matter what, Lanthimos said, “they really make an impression.” Sleeves are inclusive: they can be worn by countless bodies in countless ways and come in countless prices. They are theatrical (forget talking with your hands; talking with your arms is much more effective). And they can be resonant of sexuality, security and strength.

This makes sleeves the rare design element that’s equal parts eye-catching and cozy. Simone Rocha, whose balloon sleeves walk a fine line between childlike and sensual and have become something of a design signature, said she was drawn to the way “the proportion sculpts around the body, almost like a cocoon, creating a sense of security”. Plus, big, puffy sleeves are old-fashioned and contemporary at the same time, speaking to history and, she says, “the pragmatic feel of a work coat.”

Whatever the association, however, the result is universal: “In an upside-down world, emphasizing your physicality in space, taking up space, is a way of asserting yourself,” Roseberry said. “Of giving importance.”

Waddington agreed. “I think they’re about empowerment,” she said. Which is, in the end, the hero’s journey of “Poor Creatures” and the core of its emotional appeal. “I feel like I would like to wear big sleeves now,” said the designer.