Jenna Ortega just won't stop giving us looks. Fresh off her deliciously gothic moments while promoting the new season of Wednesday, the star shifted gears to indie sleaze at the Dior show.
What was already a rising trend has now been co-signed by Jenna, who wore a sleeveless military drummer jacket to the Parisian fashion show. As expected, it was a star-studded front row, owing to the fact that this was the Dior womenswear debut of Jonathan Anderson, one of the biggest stars in fashion at the moment.
Styled by Enrique Melendez, the brain behind Jenna Ortega's legendary recent fashion run, she wore a black sleeveless version of the popular jacket, together with a light denim mini skirt with frayed edges, black stiletto heels and aviator sunglasses. She and her stylist have clearly been following @indiesleaze on Instagram.
If you need more proof that this style is trending, look no further than Jenna's Wednesday castmate, Lady Gaga. The pop icon wore a similar jacket at her Mayhem Ball in London just this week!
From the return of Topshop to the revival of skinny jeans (people never stopped wearing them, but now they're cool again), Gen Z is going crazy for all things indie sleaze. What was once derided as just a chronically online TikTok trend – created by people so desperate to be ahead of the fashion curve that they'll just make things up – has now trickled down into clothes people are actually wearing.
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One garment from this era that seems to be popping up on many a brand's e-commerce site is the military drummer jacket. The jackets appeared in emerging designer Laura Andraschko's spring/summer 2023 collection, but, as we know, it takes a while for trends to penetrate the mainstream.
Otherwise known as the Napoleon jacket due to its use by the hussar regiments in the Napoleonic wars, it was made trendy in the 2000s by a variety of celebrities. Emo band My Chemical Romance basically used the jacket as a uniform, as did Michael Jackson, who'd been wearing his since the '80s. In fact, musicians have been wearing them as far back as Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles.
Style leaders like Beyoncé, Rihanna and Kate Moss (the poster child for today's indie sleaze movement) also wore them during the mid-to-late noughties. They were papped doing so, ingraining the jacket in our cultural consciousness and providing online inspo for the young people of today. One particularly important iteration of this jacket was the Balmain version from spring/summer 2009, which no doubt added fuel to this trend among celebs and the style set.
And, yes, Cheryl Cole wore one while performing Fight For This Love on X Factor in 2009. (Perhaps a uniquely British reference, but no less iconic.)
If you want to dabble in this trend this autumn, here's where you can find it.
