SPRING 2020 This season models sashayed, hip-swayed, marched and danced down catwalks. What's behind the shift away from po-faced models stepping in straight lines?

There are a few moments every fashion month that puncture the industry bubble. This season it came with J-Lo’s surprise appearance on the Versace catwalk. Sashaying, hips swaying, arms swooping, moving her dress as if on the cusp of flight, it created that most modern of reactions: “melting” the internet.

Another such moment wasn’t from a megastar, but a relative unknown, 20-year-old model Leon Dame, who marched down the Maison Margiela runway, jerky and inelegant, legs crossing fiercely each step, neck jutting forwards. The video of him walking received tens of thousands of likes. Rihanna even started following him. Both brought into focus the power of the catwalk walk, a phenomenon as old as the catwalk itself – and one that, right now, is threatening to distract from the clothes.

As Derek Zoolander himself knows, walking isn’t as easy as it looks. Model Veronica Webb likens it to “when you see a swan gliding across a pond – below the surface the poor beast is pedalling like mad”. Then there’s the coordination needed to be part of a troupe of models all walking at once: “What happens when a traffic jam meets a beauty contest? A fashion show!” she says. “Navigating through the other models, then getting the perfect picture at the end of the runway takes trial and error.”

J-Lo sashaying down the Versace catwalk. Photograph: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

Now, there is more of an emphasis on performance. See Issey Miyake, a brand known for its theatrical shows, where models this season upped the ante, twirling, ballet-dancing and skateboarding. Or the Charles Jeffrey show which was, says model Lorna Foran, “choreographed from start to finish”. For the finale, she and other models were instructed to stop “and almost act as if you were engulfed by euphoria!”

Such specific instructions from brands are actually fairly commonplace. “Usually [instructions are] just practical ones,” says Evelyn Nagy who walked at lots of big name shows this season, “but sometimes they recommend us to have a feeling in mind while walking.” At Celine, “Hedi loves a strong, fast, boyish walk”; at Versace, “you also need to do a strong walk but it’s more sexy and even hip-swinging is allowed”; Victoria Beckham “wants us to feel like powerful women when walking”, so will say things like: “Feel that you’re the most beautiful women in the room, and walk with that in mind.”

“Maison Margiela asked us to look weird and fierce,” says Steinberg, another model. The Row’s Olsen sisters requested that models “walk slow and a bit romantic”, according to one, Lia Pavlova. Alessandro Michele wanted Gucci model Delphi McNicol to move “as I would walking down the street”.

Skateboards underfoot at the Issey Miyake SS20 show in Paris. Photograph: Pixelformula/Sipa/Rex/Shutterstock

In real life, gait is often considered a signifier of identity, as unique as handwriting or voice. We see a friend from a distance and recognise their gait before their face. Gait can mask fictional criminals – see Kevin Spacey’s faux limp in The Usual Suspects – and, as scientists have found, can help the police catch real ones, too. That our walks are identifiable is remarkable given “we all walk in a very similar way… for efficiency,” says Dr Andy Kerr, an expert in human movement from Strathclyde University. Kerr is intrigued when I send him the clip of Dame and understands the furore over his outlier gait. “That young man’s walk is very unstable and jerky – normally you roll over your foot relatively smooth and elegant; he was bouncing down.” He stays upright, Kerr believes, only “because he’s doing it fast”.

Clearly, fashion brands try to use the way their models move to underline their brand identity – an idea some take so seriously, they hire choreographers. Creative movement director Stephen Galloway, a former principal ballet dancer, was hired by Tom Ford this season to stand at the end of the catwalk, behind the photographers, offering advice on movement. “When the models get to the end of the runway, that’s when they need to be at their best, that’s the wow moment,” he says. So he stood “physically exchanging [with the models]. She does one hip, I do one shoulder, I do one shoulder, she does one knee.”

A model runs while eating an orange during the Collina Strada SS20 show in New York. Photograph: WWD/REX/Shutterstock

If all this dancing, moving and straying outlandishly from the old school catwalk strut seems like a cynical ploy to generate a viral moment online, well, perhaps sometimes it is. But that doesn’t explain the hold it has recently taken over the industry. Take the Deveaux show, where a diverse cast of models danced to a live rendition of Janet Jackson’s Love Will Never Do (Without You). “You can’t fake fun,” says Galloway of that show (again, his work), which brought more than one seasoned fashion journalist to tears. “It falls flat. And I am extremely sensitive to that because I’m a fun guy, I can find fun in a rock.”

Part of the shift is down to who gets to be models. Buzzy, eco-minded brand Collina Strada cast friends and family in a show in which movement veered drastically from the norm – one model ran down the catwalk clutching an orange and wearing only pants, her body scribbled with environmental slogans. If you’re not a veteran industry insider, you might be free of some of the shackles generally imposed by it.

A model dances down the catwalk at the Deveaux show at New York fashion week, September 2019. Photograph: Mike Coppola/Getty

According to Charlie Engman, who styled that show, “wider access to media and platforms of self-expression” are beginning to mean more inclusion. “There was the era of the supermodel, where walks had individuality and power but upheld certain conventions of wealth, health, body type and a very specific idea of gender. Now, different experiences and bodies bring different walks.” In fact, this circles back to the freer catwalks of 80s London where club kids and designers’ friends modelled. The key difference now is dissemination through the internet.

For Webb, who walked for the likes of Azzedine Alaïa and Karl Lagerfeld in the 90s and, after a hiatus, began walking in shows again a few years ago, this season was ripe with opportunities to emote. Tommy Hilfiger, where models danced down a Harlem catwalk as if they were at the block party the set had been made to look like, was “a real chance for me to express what it means to own your age, own your beauty and own your power.” While Deveaux was a chance to bring individuality in a way “that has been out of style for runway struts for at least a decade. Best of all,” she says, “the model lineup looked like the world I really live in.”

• Read more from the spring/summer 2020 edition of The Fashion, our biannual style supplement