The red carpet at the Cannes film festival is the pinnacle of glamour. Every inch of that floor-sweeping gown and each falling hair tendril has been picked over by stylists and “glam squads”. So when film director and Cannes jury president Greta Gerwig appeared on the red carpet last week in a dress that was wrinkled, you would be forgiven for thinking that someone was about to be fired.

But Gerwig’s hot-pink Balenciaga couture gown wasn’t accidentally creased, a pesky side-effect of a car ride from hotel to Croissette. It was intentional – from asymmetric shoulder right down to the hemline, it was corrugated like a hot tin roof.

The dress, one of several at Cannes possibly inspired by ridge cut McCoy’s, is a barometer of a wider languorous mood, with crinkles and creases enjoying a moment. Ironing is on the downturn among millennials and generation Z – a recent study found that one in three people under 35 don’t own an iron, whereas 90% of people over 45 do. When younger people were asked why they didn’t iron, responses varied from not owning clothes that needed ironing to participants believing that ironing “is not important to me” or that they simply “did not like it”.

A quick poll among my thirtysomething peer group illustrates that weddings and job interviews are the rare occasions when an iron is heated up. While a whole generation may be terrified of facial wrinkles, they are most definitely embracing the furrows when it comes to their clothes.

Often it is the ironing more than the creases that is the problem. On TikTok, “hack” videos offer advice on how to get an ironed effect without actually ironing, from using hair straighteners to smooth out collars and cuffs to misting bed linen with a crease-release spray. Meanwhile, the popular Swedish brand Steamery, which sells pastel-coloured handheld steamers, offers an aspirational, millennial-chic way to get rid of the worst offenders minus an iron.

Looking to the backstory of high fashion’s love of a crease, Gerwig’s pink Balenciaga dress was originally shown on the catwalk in 2022. Nicole Kidman modelled a similar shape in the same show, in silver-coated silk. The designer’s notes called them “crinkled”. It was preceded by Prada, where backstage at the label’s spring/summer 2023 collection, co-creative director Raf Simons described deliberately creased midi skirts and shirts as “gestures of error” designed to replicate “pieces that have had a life”.

Now high-end and high-street brands are embracing crumpled clothing. Earlier this month, Selena Gomez wore a dress from the Australian company Maticevski, which describes its creases as “sharp architectural folds”. The New York-based label Tibi sells rumpled T-shirts and shirts that have been put through a “crinkling machine” to ensure the creases hold. “Wrinkles and creasing of even the most durable fabrications are unavoidable, so why not embrace them?” reads a blurb on its website. Meanwhile, Zara is selling wrinkly jeans and suiting “designed to maintain its characteristic rough appearance”.

More recently, the trend has cut a line for the interiors industry, with crinkled linen tablecloths taking the place of those that have been painstakingly ironed. Posting on Instagram, David Stark – who runs an event and design agency in New York – described an unironed Belgian linen tablecloth he unveiled at a dinner party as “an experiment in wabi sabi, the embrace of transience and imperfection”. Although, he confided, “secretly, it makes me uncomfortable”, asking his followers to decide whether it was “sloppy or dreamy”.

The anti-ironing trend isn’t exactly new. M&S first introduced its non-iron shirts in 1996, while Miuccia Prada has been embracing the just-picked-up-off-the-floor look since 1998, when she sent unironed white cotton separates down the Miu Miu catwalk.

For some, ironing everything from bed sheets to pants will always be a must. But if you are tempted to try the crease, make it look intentional rather than slapdash by pairing a neatly pressed shirt with a crinkled silk skirt. If it’s good enough for Mrs Prada …

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