Leopard Print is One of Fall’s Biggest Fashion Trends

In Mike Nichols’s 1967 masterpiece The Graduate, Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson undresses for Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock to reveal a leopard-print strapless brassiere and matching half-slip.

Braddock is rendered fumbling and sweaty-palmed. “Haven’t you ever seen anyone in a slip before?” Mrs. Robinson asks him in her nicotine-sanded voice, her delivery as silken as her underthings. There is a stillness and a feline confidence to her seduction—an animal with too-easy prey.

In nearly every scene, Bancroft is swathed in leopard spots, her costuming a signal of her sexual prowess and her role as nocturnal predator. A gingham bralette or pointelle camisole would not have conveyed the same magnetism. Leopard print, like Mrs. Robinson herself, skirts the line between ladylike and libidinous.

Leopard has long been code for a worldly, self-possessed femininity—a woman in full command of her wiles. In Greek and Roman mythology, the cat was a symbol of feminine power; the Greek goddess Artemis and Diana, Roman goddess of fertility and the moon, took the shape of a cat.

Leopard pelts have historically been a symbol of wealth and status, serving as ceremonial dress for Egyptian high priests and pharaohs, swathing African kings and 17th-century French and Italian nobility. In the 1920s, actor Marion Nixon promenaded the streets of Hollywood with her pet leopard whilst perversely wearing a matching coat.

Christian Dior, mercifully turning away from the violence of the fur trade, divined the first leopard print fabric for his 1947 collection, debuting an evening gown and a day dress, dubbing them “Jungle” and “Afrique.” In Dior’s The Little Dictionary of Fashion, the designer advised: “To wear leopard you must have a kind of femininity which is a little bit sophisticated. If you are fair and sweet, don’t wear it.”

Like the wild cat itself, the print has had a way of pouncing into fashion, then retreating into the shadows. This season, it’s on the prowl anew, walking the runways at Marni, Alexander McQueen and Balenciaga.

For Dior’s Fall 2024 ready-to-wear show, Maria Grazia Chiuri sent out leopard print coats and hats in an ode to collections past. Meanwhile, Isabel Marant unleashed a jungle of leopard-print coats, jeans and boots. “We don’t do quiet luxury,” Marant declared while describing her collection. “We do unquiet luxury.” The print is a claws-out swipe at the retiring ennui of stealth wealth and modest minimalism.

It’s this loudness that has made leopard print wildly divisive. With the wrong silhouette, unrefined fabric or too-tawny undertones it can be more than a whisker vulgar, lunging cheaply into sleaze and camp.

My mother is French, and I’m forever imprinted with the general Gallic sense that vulgarity—along with charmlessness and tastelessness—is among the worst of offences. But I was also raised with a certain vive la résistance spirit. And as a lifelong cat lady, it strikes me as almost disloyal to reject the beauty of this feline pattern.