Why is every dress a sack now?

Welcome to The Great Blobification.

One day, we will talk about this shade of green that was everywhere last year which I cannot stand.

Clothes shopping has always been a nightmarish hellscape but probably more now so than ever before. Besides the rising costs of everything, the proliferation of low-quality materials, trash fire online returns processes, sizing systems that make no god damn sense, it’s much, much worse if you’re also looking for anything that’s been consciously and ethically made. I’ve noted before that a lot of sustainable brands are rather insistent on boxy, baggy and billowing clothing, but I hadn’t realised the Great Blobification had become an almost industry wide phenomenon.

In my daily, work-mandated trend research (read: pretending to work while I mess up a marketing team’s day by adding things to carts I will never, ever buy), I realised that across mainstream and niche brands, conscious or fast fashion, shape is increasingly absent. From mass retailers like Mr Price, Bash and Superbalist, to DTC brands like Imprecca, and eco and designer like The Local Edit and Africa Rise to collect some data. Almost 78% of their dresses are just rectangles*.

Dresses filtered by Fit and Flare on Bash

Not to bemoan rectangles. They’re the glorious building block of fashion. I recently shared on my Instagram how this 4-sided quadrilateral is a key component of historical African design, which prioritises material over form and shape and currently one of my favourite things to wear all the time is a pink and red sack from Canvas Studios (which, haha, I’m wearing in that same video). (Also, if you’d like to hear more about African fashion stuff, you can check out my podcast, Clothes Minded.)

And, one might argue, that big sacks make the most sense for conscious, sustainable design. The excess fabric allows for more styling options (belting, folding, pleating, draping and pinning-up as the girls like to do), easier alterations (it’s always easier to take a dress in that it is let out), and greater size adjustability as well as removing the focus on your actual figure particularly in a time of such unattainable body ideals. Plus, relying on these oblong fits means less waste is generated in the making process - important if you’re shelling out the big bucks for natural fibres like organic cotton, linen, or wool (but, also, equally important even when working with synthetics like polyester and spandex which will inevitably end up in landfills and never biodegrade).

But, also, one might also argue that these comparatively simple shapes are a quick way to cut costs too. The non-sack dresses to which I’m referring often feature a more complex construction process. They’ll consist of darts (sections of fabric taken in around the bust to help shape the fabric over the curves of the body), bias cutting (a technique in which fabric is not cut on the straight grain of fabric but rather a 45 degree line which means less economical cutting), or smocking and shirring, Fabric itself arrives a 2-D rectangle and to conform that to fit and hug over the 3-D body is considerably more work than just having cloth hang from the shoulders. Less fabric manipulation means less labour means less time spent means more profits (line must go up, after all).

An example of patterns being cut on the bias. Note how much fabric isn’t used.

You might, at this point, be thinking about bodycon dresses, which are very rife in dress offerings and happen to be figure-hugging, as a counterpoint to the Great Blobification. But you’re thinking wrong, buddy. The majority of bodycon dresses available are often spandex and elastane blends if not knit fabrics which, when lain flat and not on a body, are also rectangles with some very mild shaping. Which comes back to cost-cutting. Stretch fabrics are much cheaper (and primarily derived of petrochemicals) and simpler to work with than wovens since our use for them in frocks relies on the body to provide shape as opposed to the techniques I mentioned before like darts, pleating or bias cutting.

I’m not assigning any moral value to whether or not dresses should be rectangles or not but it is weird that so many of them are nowadays. Of the 160 dresses available on Mr Price, about 73% of them were sacks of the boxy, baggy and bodycon variety. Superbalist came in at 80.74% out of 3421 dresses, Bash at 86.77% out of 801 and Woolworths at 71.16% out of 267*.

Top Rated Dresses on Superbalist

Top Rated Dresses on Bash

Influencer favourite, Imprecca, is pretty much all bodycon dresses and one loose-fitting maxi in 3 colour ways. The Pick n Pay Clothing website crashed every time I tried to list by category.

Dresses on The Local Edit

Dresses on Africa Rise

The Local Edit and Africa Rise have an almost similarly simple UI so sorting by category wasn’t possibly but the first few pages filtered by Most Popular or Recommended were also a lot of sacks - though, I will note that there were much more fit and flare or hourglass options, they just happened to go for north of R5k. Which reminds of a recent The Cut article which asked, “Why Are Does A Simple Summer Dress Cost So Much Now?”

Six summer dresses compared for The Cut, from left to right: Shein, Fashion Nova, House of CB, Staud, Ronny Kobo and Tove.

It compares a range of typical sun dresses, and even though no one knows what that actually is, these were defined as white, fit and flare midi-length dress that’s tight around the waist with thin shoulder straps (the opposite of the sack) and when you’re not relying on Shein, Temu or Fashion Nova, the majority of them are rather expensive and rarely with the quality and fit to back that up.

There is also the chance that this is all just a natural pendulum swing. Along with BBL-fashion fatigue and a growing move towards modesty, the pandemic has left a legacy of comfort and ease in our daily clothing. The stereotypical Dress that isn’t sack is tight and form-fitting, making use of zippers, buttons and lacing, often requiring a bra or shape wear, and comes off a lot more effortful than just throwing on what is essentially a long t-shirt or gown. We’ve moved away from ‘dressing up’ and instead just throwing that shit on; once again, another thing we’ve lost once we let the Silicon Valley bros take over.

*This isn’t super accurate data, by the way, since a lot of the websites incorrectly (to me) describe quite a few of their dresses. I calculated this by dividing the number of dresses describes as A-line and/or Fit and Flare by the total available. One a few websites, I’d come across slinky, straight slip dresses in the A-line section or anything that had a waist seam in the Fit and Flare section. Plus, to be honest, consumer-facing dress terminology is often misguided, conflating silhouette with style (as in hourglass is the silhouette but can applied to the different styles of halter dress, wrap dress or shirt dress).