Here’s a phrase that will fill some with glee, and many with dread: the shoulder pad is back. Much maligned, often misused, the wardrobe staple of the 1980s is being revived with gusto some 40 years after its literal height of popularity. This time, it looks bigger than ever.
It crept up slowly through the autumn/winter 2025 womenswear season: Veronica Leoni showed squared-off, Working Girl suiting at her debut Calvin Klein show in New York, and there were a few swaggering, wide-shouldered turns in Milan at Ferragamo and Sportmax.
But in Paris the upturned triangle look took root. On the very first evening, young brand Vaquera sent out taffeta dressed with wildly ruched shoulders straight out of a 1980s Emanuel Ungaro show. Stella McCartney thumped out the shoulder line of draped jersey dresses and office tailoring, while Schiaparelli’s Daniel Roseberry designed an ode to his native Texas with quarterback shoulders on slithery evening dresses, denims and embroidered jackets. Even the flowy, boho-y Chemena Kamali closed her Chloé show with four ruffled crepe de chine blouses balanced on shoulder pads so broad you’d barely be able to fit through a regular doorframe wearing them. By the time Paris Fashion Week closed with Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent show — featuring, probably, the widest shoulders of the entire week — a trend-line was formed.
This isn’t just catwalk conjecture. Speaking after fashion week, international buyers highlighted those strong shoulders as a key shape of the season to come. Pre-orders of the Chloé blouses on the Moda Operandi website carry the caveat that “more inclusive shoulders” — meaning smaller — are in production, but most store buyers are going all-out for the big guns.
“The strong shoulder was one of the most coherent messages to come out of the [autumn/winter 2025] season,” says Simon Longland, director of fashion buying at Harrods. The store has bought into it with designers including Schiaparelli, Rick Owens, Givenchy and Saint Laurent. Tiffany Hsu, chief buying officer of Mytheresa, has also been buying into emphatic shoulders. She underlines the importance of Saint Laurent, “which is really setting the whole trend. The shoulder is just getting bigger.” Saint Laurent is a linchpin of buying at Net-a-Porter too, says fashion director Kay Barron, who also highlights the “confident” suiting at Stella McCartney.
That’s generally the feel, when we talk about shoulder pads — they’re tied to power, to aggression, often denigrated as a way of “masculinising” women. That was an idea some viewed as necessary when women began to compete in male-dominated corporate environments for the first time in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
But the roots of the style actually lie 50 years earlier, in the 1930s, part of a look dubbed “hard chic”. It was one of the first trends primarily powered not by high fashion but by mass media, via the Hollywood costume designer Gilbert Adrian, who designed for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and dressed Joan Crawford. They were also connected with the mannish tailoring sported by Marlene Dietrich, who helped promote trousers as a somewhat scandalous addition to women’s wardrobes (some hotels and restaurants would refuse entry to women wearing them, right up until the 1960s).
Padded shoulders were also practical — they made sleeves easier to fit to standardised sizing in an era of increasing mass-manufacture. All reasons the style would dominate from the early ’30s through the wartime years — when women were dressed like soldiers in sharp-shouldered suiting — until 1947, when it was swept away with Christian Dior’s soft-shouldered “New Look”. He later wrote that his clothes were reactions to women dressing like Amazons, in clothes that looked like uniforms.
Dior may have hated it, but many women find security in the authority implied by shoulder pads. Those are some of the reasons that Yves Saint Laurent chose to revive them in a 1940s-inspired couture collection for spring/summer 1971. Coming after the baby-doll and flower-child looks of the 1960s, they seemed revolutionary. Saint Laurent wanted to empower women — a cliché today, but revolutionary back then.
There was also a heavy dose of nostalgia at play — he wanted to pay homage to the clothes he remembered his mother wearing when he was a child. Reviled by the press because of its allusions to the “vulgar” clothes of the wartime Vichy collaborators — “a tour de force of bad taste”, said the Guardian at the time — Saint Laurent’s collection nevertheless set the template for the following two decades, in both sharp executive suiting and flamboyant eveningwear.
Our shoulder-pad references today tend to come from this era, shaped by that Saint Laurent line — but also, again, by mass media. As Joan Crawford popularised the shoulder pad in the 1930s and 1940s, so Joan Collins brought it to the televisions of millions in the 1980s with her turn on Dynasty, a show whose costumes, designed by Nolan Miller, stuffed doorstop-sized shoulder pads into everything from tracksuits to 18th-century fancy dress, setting the style of the decade.
“Dynasty” has basically become an adjective, generally pejorative, for whenever designers push a strong shoulder that little bit too far. Which is easily done — shoulder pads have often become cartoonish, as was the case with the most extreme silhouettes proposed by the French designers Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana in the 1980s. With shoulders extending a good six inches or more each side of their neck, wearers often wound up resembling fashion illustrations come to life.
A tour de force of bad taste, incidentally, is an astute summary of many reactions to the bolder shoulder even now. Plenty of people hate them, particularly because they remember their ’80s ubiquity, when even a T-shirt wasn’t considered complete without a cheap wedge of foam on each shoulder. Interestingly, however, today’s shoulder pads are being championed by designers who are often hurrahed for their intuitive knowledge of what women want.
Phoebe Philo is often credited with such sense — she doesn’t show on the catwalk, but her website right now is filled with sharply angled coats and jackets built out on solid pads. Some rounded styles even sit under soft jersey tops and dresses, topstitched through the fabric and plainly visible. Likewise, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen of The Row. For autumn/winter 2025, they too proposed broad-shouldered tailoring, highlighted with epaulettes, and flaps and sleeves sloping off the body.
The look may wink to retro, but shoulder pads today are a far cry from the three-inch-thick pads sewn into the suits of the ’80s. Back then, pads were made of layered cotton, polyester, horsehair and canvas, compressed into solid bricklike structures, or thick but flimsy foam loosely tacked into dresses. Today, they’re soft but sturdy, made of non-woven interfacings comprised of cotton-synthetic mixes or polyester felt.
Now, lightness is key: all buyers assert that shoulder pads today shouldn’t be buttressing a silhouette like armour, but rather contrasting the sharp with the soft, in gentle tailoring. In fact, the most modern shoulders in Paris didn’t have pads at all. Those belonged to Saint Laurent’s Vaccarello, who used the inherent qualities of specific materials to form his graphic shapes. There was lots of organza, to push out the shape — including some sandwiched between layers of silicone, to create even more volume. “Inside the clothes this season, there’s absolutely no structure,” he said backstage. “The volume is created by the shape of the clothes, and the fabric . . . it’s a reference from the past, twisted for the future.” Exactly how the new strong shoulder should be worn. Joan Collins redux, this is not.
Follow us on Instagram and sign up for Fashion Matters, your weekly newsletter about the fashion industry
Read the full article here