This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
I will never not love a spot. Sartorial OCD being what it is, I can lay claim to 19 polka pieces. Were we to include accessories, matters would easily cavort beyond 30, beyond 40 were every last scarf inventoried. This season there are bound to be more, because dots are everywhere — be it catwalk or sidewalk — and we lifers must seize opportunity where we can.
Said polka pash has been bubbling up for a while. For the last couple of years, whether muted (Burberry) or flamenco (Proenza Schouler), the spot has dominated, with Marni, Prada, Miu Miu, Valentino, Dolce & Gabbana, Moschino, Marc Jacobs, Tory Burch and Sacai all gone dotty.
Back in spring 2023, the nonagenarian artist Yayoi Kusama exemplified her axiom, “With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved”, by festooning Louis Vuitton stores across the globe — and London’s Harrods façade — with an outbreak of her signature spots to celebrate her latest Vuitton collaboration. Kusama’s thang is self-obliteration to become at one with the universe.
For, as she has opined: “Our earth is only one polka dot amongst a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment.” So there’s that.
Now, I’m as self-obliterating as the next chap, but aren’t spots also just pure joy? Compare rival artist, Twilight’s Anna Kendrick’s, assertion: “You can’t have a bad day in polka dots.” This, my friends, is science. You just can’t. I say this as a depressive who routinely has a bad day sans spot.
The endorphin hit the polka dot provides is reflected in its hedonic heritage. Spots appeared on fabric before the Industrial Revolution.
However, the technology to create symmetrical dots on a large scale only arrived in the mid-1850s with the advent of the sewing machine. The fashionable classes could now purchase new ’fits every season, just as they could execute the latest steps — to the Czech peasant dance the polka.
If the waltz had shocked polite society with its racy degree of physical contact, how much more so this frenetic, entwined circling, from which the print’s frenetic circles took their name. Polkamania convulsed Europe, and its dots danced on.
Over the decades, they have never not proved lunatically cheering — this whether sported by Minnie Mouse and Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, Twiggy and Goldie Hawn, or by Diana, Princess of Wales donning posh dots for Eighties Sloane mode, and Julia Roberts’ happy hooker emulating her to watch polo in 1990’s Pretty Woman.
Such a stalwart has the spot been that it feels rather ludicrous to say that it’s in vogue, even when it’s in Vogue — being not so much a perennial as a constant. Moreover, just as leopard print qualifies as a neutral for some women, so dots boast this status for others (moi).
In whatever context they find themselves, spots manage to be chic yet kitschily witty, their wearer unable to take themselves too seriously. Jaunty, sporting, forever fresh, they’ve long been a Gatsbyish cruise-wear staple: a peppy, preppy, gender-neutral faithful managing to feel both ordered and chaotic, retro and contemporary and never not full of glee.
Which is why, one might argue, they’re bustin’ out all over now, when doom, doom is the name of the global game, the apocalypse never not pending. Meanwhile, on Planet Fashion, the dot is a means of signifying that a wearer has danced on from quiet-luxury tedium and into something suggestive of interest, flamboyance, fun.
The spins right now are salacious rather than prim, knowing rather than naïve: all Dolce Vita sex siren, or Rive Gauche haute sleaze.
Then, there are a whole lot of Nineties slip dresses and skirts, plus other winning throwbacks such as Prada’s sequin-dotted slim tote (£1,530, mytheresa.com). Valentino’s take is as hotly desirable as it is extortionate — a bugger for those of us sans means. In the mid-market, quality can be poor (Reformation, The Kooples — I’m looking at you) so stick to Cefinn or Rixo.
On the high street, one could do a lot worse than head to M&S for its Polka Dot V-Neck Midaxi Tea Dress (£49.50), and/or the Nobody’s Child Polka Dot High-Neck Blouse (£65, marksandspencer.com).
Two further thoughts. First, pearls are Mother Nature’s own dots so rock ’em. Second, 2025’s animal prints are (the also très Nineties) zebra and cow. I’m deeming them spot-adjacent because too much is never enough.
