Diana Ikhsanova’s latest collection situates itself within a familiar but still potent discourse: fashion as a vessel for presence, sensuality, and the reclamation of feminine time. The garments: cocktail dresses in silk, blouses cut with deliberate softness not as fragility but as a practice of self-possession. The collection reads almost like a proposal that dressing can be an affective state rather than a social performance.
Roland Barthes, in The Fashion System, argued that garments are as much about language as about utility: the signified body of “the feminine” is constantly rewritten through cut, texture, and drape. Diana’s reliance on silk: shiny, reflective, weightless, aligns with a long lineage, from Vionnet’s bias-cut gowns to the slippery surfaces of Narciso Rodriguez in the 1990s. Yet in the present context, saturated with “quiet luxury” and wellness-driven aesthetics, softness risks sliding into cliché unless it is destabilised.
The cocktail dress has historically thrived on ambiguity: worn in transitional hours, it was designed to be both visible and understated, both social and intimate. Diana’s interpretation leans into this liminality: pared-down dresses that hover between private sensuality and public polish. But unlike Christopher Kane’s sharp provocations or Nensi Dojaka’s spidery constructions, which bring erotic tension back into cocktailwear, Diana’s pieces are more reverent than disruptive. They whisper when others provoke.
The collection’s stated ethos: pleasure as birthright, femininity as grounded rather than performed, resonates with Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, in which identity is not an essence but a practice repeated through gestures, dress, and ritual. What Diana suggests is that clothing can hold space for pleasure without audience, for self-romance without external validation. It’s an elegant proposition, but one that risks romanticising softness as timeless essence rather than interrogating its cultural and historical contingencies.
There is no doubt that A Woman’s Pleasure succeeds in mood: the dresses and blouses feel tactile, atmospheric, carefully resolved. But sincerity alone does not guarantee innovation. In an environment where The Row, Totême, and Loro Piana already dominate with their rhetoric of slowness and tactility, the challenge is how to carve out a signature that unsettles, interrupts, or complicates. Without this, the garments risk blending into the very landscape they are meant to question.
Diana Ikhsanova’s latest collection is conceptually articulate and aesthetically refined: a thoughtful reflection on intimacy, softness, and presence. Its weakness lies not in execution but in caution, an unwillingness to let tension or contradiction enter the frame.
If the next step is to move from reverence to interrogation, then Diana is well placed to do it. For now, the collection offers a poised contribution to the discourse of femininity in fashion, one that feels sincere, if not yet radical.
Photographer: Felix Ikh
Fashion Designer: Vivant @vivant.kimonos
Model: Diana Ikhsanova @dianaikhsanovaa
