The Death of the Performance

An essay on female power, fashion, and what comes after the girlboss

Written by: Divya Agarwal (Creative Director, QUA)

There was a moment, somewhere between 2012 and 2019, when female ambition was given a costume and told to be grateful. The blazer with the slogan lining. The tote bag with the word "boss" on it. The Instagram caption about hustle and healing in the same breath. Power, as it was sold to women in that era, was loud, legible, and desperately eager to be seen. It announced itself in the room before the woman did. It came with a personal brand attached.

We were told this was progress. It looked, from a distance, like it might be.

It wasn't.

What the girlboss era actually did was take the oldest demand ever made of women - perform, be visible, make others comfortable with your ambition by packaging it attractively - and rebrand it as liberation.

The performance didn't disappear. It just changed costumes. Instead of performing softness and availability, women were not performing strength and hustle. The audience was different. The requirement to perform was identical.

Fashion participated enthusiastically. Power dressing in the eighties had at least been honest about what it was - armour, borrowed from men, worn to gain entry to rooms that hadn't been built for you. It was strategic mimicry and everyone knew it. What followed was stranger: clothes that performed feminism while leaving its economics untouched, drops timed to International Women's Day, collaborations with women who had large followings rather than interesting minds. The garment became a vehicle for messaging. The woman wearing it became secondary to the message.

Something shifted around 2020. Quietly, and then all at once.

The women I watch - and I watch them closely, the way a designer must - stopped performing. 

Not as an act of rebellion. Not as a statement. Simply because the performance had become too expensive and too obviously pointless.

A woman who has built something real, who has made decisions that cost her, who has sat alone with the hard consequences of her own choices she has no patience left for the theatre of ambition. She has the thing itself. She doesn't need to signal it.

This is the woman I design for. She has changed what I believe clothing is for.

She is not dressing to be legible. She is not dressing to signal her tribe, her politics, her net worth, her aesthetic alignment with a particular cultural moment. She is dressing the way she makes every other decision - from the inside out, for reasons that are entirely her own, with a clarity that reads to others as confidence and is actually something quieter and more absolute than that. It is self-knowledge. It is the radical act of knowing exactly who you are and requiring no one else's confirmation of it.

What does this look like in clothes? It looks like nothing announcing itself.

It looks like a fabric that is technically extraordinary and visually restrained. It looks like a silhouette that does something interesting with the body without asking the body to perform. It looks like beauty that doesn't explain itself - that gives you something to look at without giving you a caption for what you're seeing.

The references that feel true to this moment are not the power-dressing archives. They are of a woman alone in a room, complete, requiring nothing from you. A refusal to make anything simply pretty. The reference is always a woman who has more going on than she is showing you. The clothes understands this. They hold the surplus.

I think we are at the beginning of a longer reckoning in fashion with what women actually are, as opposed to what has been commercially convenient for them to be. The girlboss had a good run. She moved the product. She gave brands a story to tell that felt contemporary and safe simultaneously. But she was always a simplification - a reduction of female complexity into a form that was palatable and profitable and ultimately hollow.

The woman who comes after her is harder to market to, which is precisely what makes her interesting. She doesn't need the tote bag. She doesn't need the slogan. She doesn't need fashion to tell her who she is or to confirm that her ambition is valid. She arrived at herself through a series of private decisions that no brand was present for and no campaign can claim credit for. She is, in the most useful sense of the word, self-authored.

What she needs from clothes is not identity. It is equipment. Garments that are as serious as she is, that understand the full range of what her day requires, that hold complexity without collapsing it into something easier to look at. Clothes that are, in their own way, as complete as she is.

This is what I am trying to make. Not fashion for a woman who is becoming. Fashion for a woman who already is - and knows it, and dresses accordingly, and doesn't look back to check if you're watching.

She isn't doing it for you.

She never was.