welcome back fall winter ‘97, we’ve missed you
By Khalifah Ali
Fashion dreams in déjà vu.
Silhouettes drift through memory; fabrics sigh like ghosts of touch. Burgundy exhales again, suede returns to skin, and skirts fall with a modesty so deliberate it becomes rebellion. Fall/Winter 1997 has been beautifully reborn on the runway.
In those years, designers spoke softly. Prada taught us that imperfection could seduce, that intellect could nestle within a cardigan’s sleeve. Helmut Lang carved discipline from nylon and air; Jil Sander made silence emotional. Tom Ford at Gucci turned texture into temptation, while McQueen twisted tailoring until it trembled. Together, they composed a season that didn’t shout but whisper.
Now, nearly three decades later, that whisper returns.
On the runways, silhouettes glided. At Ferragamo, suede coats wrapped the body like a tender memory. The Row built stillness into its tailoring, architectural, unhurried, precise as prayer. Bottega Veneta folded leather into soft geometry, hugging and yearning the body, as though the material itself remembered being cloth. Even Loewe, with its surreal modernism, hums in the same cerebral key once struck by Lang.
Minimalism was never emptiness; it was precision. The art of listening with the eyes. A deliberate pause between gestures. A skirt that stopped just below the knee, a jacket with a quiet funnel neck, a cardigan that refused adornment. Every restraint was an act of rebellion against excess. And now, after seasons of noise and glitter, restraint once again feels defiant. Fall 2025 answers chaos not with spectacle, but with stillness. Fashion exhales, and what escapes is a whisper.
This return is not imitation; it is reincarnation.
The woman of 1997 was learning to define herself through thought as much as beauty. The woman of 2025 continues her story, not nostalgic, but knowing. Her clothes are her armor: soft yet structured, sensual yet steady. The suit breathes with light; Prada’s once “ugly chic” has become a prophecy of womanhood, of self-possession.
There is elegance in this repetition. Style, after all, is a language written in time, each decade revising its sentences until they sound like honesty. The funnel-neck jacket becomes a meditation on proportion; the statement skirt, an essay on movement; the muted palette, a poem about memory.
Perhaps that is why Fall 2025 feels so intimate. After seasons of spectacle, designers have turned inward, rediscovering the poetry of form. Clothes no longer beg to be seen, they ache to be felt. We are invited to listen again: to the rustle of suede, the hush of wool, the gentle disobedience of restraint.
Welcome back, Fall/Winter ’97.
We missed your thoughtful silence, your refusal to please, your faith in understatement. You return not as nostalgia, but as proof that evolution can be quiet and that elegance, when it is true, always finds its way home.
