Facing winter requires broad shoulders Nothing makes you feel powerful like the right silhouette

«Don’t you know it’s the year of the shoulder? Big shoulders are in and small shoulders are out, out, out!», was said more than two decades ago in one of the more rambunctious episodes of Will & Grace where it was speculated, which was unthinkable at the time, that the 1980s power shoulder trend was making a comeback among wealthy Manhattan ladies. The name isn't random: the style defined 1980s office attire, a time when women began their climb to the top of companies wearing suits and jackets from which all softness was banned and which, instead, had to express all that volition and strength of their male colleagues. It is no accident that shoulder pads are mostly associated with jackets, but in truth we are full of examples of power shoulders scattered just about everywhere: from the denim jackets and evening gowns of Dolly Parton to the couture seen on Joan Collins in every episode of Dynasty, to Lady Diana's red dress and the uniforms of Wynona Rider and Shannon Doherty in Heathers. Today there is talk of their return. Even the most inattentive eyes noticed them in the Saint Laurent shows, where the shoulders of blazers were monumental, and also at Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, Dior, Diesel, Celine, and, of course, Prada where the lines of huge but shirt-thin jackets started from huge shoulders and flowed into a narrow waist. But where did the power shoulder come from?

But why a comeback today? As the capitalist drunkenness of the 1980s came to an end, the public reacted to the excess of silhouettes, materials, and decorations with an opposite, simplified, understated look. Those exaggerated shoulders, so tied to an era and values that had ceased to be modern gradually vanished. Before long, only Fran Drescher remained to wear the exuberant shoulder pads in episodes of The Nanny, to symbolize the eccentricity of her character. The silhouette re-emerged a full two decades later, between 2009 and 2011, thanks to Lady Gaga and Rihanna, only to be erased from the streetwear wave and timidly make a comeback with Me Too until this season, where it has emerged in a more overt form.

But why the reason for this return? We identify two: the first, the most abstract and most mundane, is the return of power dressing, a series of "sartorial signifiers" that project authority, high social status and importance. The bible of power dressing was John T. Molloy's Dress for Success manuals, which basically suggested making the upper body more severe and masculine while maintaining feminine aspects in skirts and accessories, de-sexualizing and de-objectifying the female body by helping women to position themselves as authoritative presences in the workplace. The idea was to create a genderless severity that would eliminate the perceived frivolity of the female wardrobe and echoes well with the values of the new feminist wave that defines our age. The second, perhaps a bit more cynical, concerns quiet luxury: when colors and garments become simplified, flattening out to purely sartorial, volumes and materials end up in the foreground and therefore it becomes necessary, in order to give character and identity to fairly generic garments, to create a more incisive silhouette. The easiest way to create a strong silhouette is, trivially, to pad the shoulders, also echoing the "man's coat on a woman" trend that was expressed in all its power this year.