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Miguel Castro Freitas is sitting in his office at the Mugler atelier in Paris on Monday morning, and three things are laid before the house’s newish creative director on a glass and chrome desk: a jar of honey, gifted by the father of someone on his design team who keeps bees (and which he keeps close to hand to treat sore throats—an occupational hazard of fashion week); a tin beside it, which I mistook for tea, but is in fact full of pins; and a stack of DVDs—Pink Flamingoes, Lost Highway, Lola, Metropolis, Sunset Boulevard, The Blue Angel, and Mildred Pierce among them. I ask you: Could this list of movies be any more Mugler?
The work of Thierry Mugler, who founded the label in 1974, oscillated between old Hollywood, high camp, and outer space—and sometimes encompassed all three—but was always delivered by a fierce talent aided and abetted by a scalpel-sharp sense of form and fit. Those who dismiss Mugler as only a flashy showman do so at their own risk.
As it turns out, those movies are crucial for all sorts of reasons for the Portuguese Freitas, 45, who joined Mugler at the end of March, his stellar resume including work at Dior (with both John Galliano and Raf Simons), Dries Van Noten, Alber Elbaz’s Lanvin and, most recently, the behind-the-scenes creative directorship of Sportmax (which he says, allowed him to take on a lead role without the attendant pressures of being thrust into the spotlight—a perfect trial run for his new job). The DVDs are destined to be part of the invitations for his debut show.
“Which one would you like?” I am asked. “Oh, surprise me,” I say, though secretly I am hoping for the 1961 Jacques Demy Lola, as I’ve never seen it. (“One of my favorites,” Freitas tells me a bit later. “Have you watched Demy’s Bay of Angels? It’s lovely.”) There’s a more crucial reason for having all those movies at hand, though: Freitas says he shares Mugler’s love of classic Hollywood, which proved an immediate way to find common ground with him. (Freitas’s all-time top three, incidentally, are Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, and Some Like It Hot.) Movies are also both specific inspiration for his debut collection, entitled Aphrodite Stardust, and integral to his working practices more generally.
“I like to have keywords on my moodboard,” explains Freitas. “They evoke the mood of the collection [as much as the images]—they’re very sensorial to me.” On the moodboard at the moment, much inspired by his cineaste interests: Kitsch Glamour, Stardust, Poetic Camp, Nocturnal, and Purist Maximalism, to give you just a few, all of them pinned up alongside images of classic Mugler, such as a Helmut Newton photo of a star-spangled, bodysuit-clad Eva Herzigova looking like a showgirl—showgirls across the decades are a big part of his thinking for the collection—as well as the likes of hip-jutting Jacques Fath cocktailania, Judy Garland, spooky Hans Bellmer artwork, the corsetière Mr. Pearl, Nineties Martin Margiela (bet you weren’t expecting that), Jayne Mansfield (he loved the recent Mariska Hargitay documentary, and he’s obsessed with Mansfield’s former home, the now demolished Pink Palace), and Guinevere Van Seenus in a scarlet-draped and crushed mimi-crinoline John Galliano dress shot by David Sims in 1996 (bet you weren’t expecting that either).
“This collection will have a very unique expression in the sense that it will be part of a trilogy—a trilogy of glorified cliches,” says Freitas, who’s engagingly smart and warm. He and I have barely been speaking for ten minutes, and already I realize that he is eager to face the legacy of Mugler head-on—even reveling in the challenge. “It’s embracing the idea of a cliché, as Mugler is very much connected to that,” he says. “These universal obsessions have been recurring throughout the years: the power dressing, the glamour, the femme fatale, and retro futurism. At the beginning of this journey [with Mugler], I wanted to be almost archeological—this discovery of the codes of the house by digging into the archives.”
At the same time (and this is something our conversation goes back to again and again): How do you take the golden age of Hollywood—or a designer with an indelible and illustrious past and an arc of glory years spanning the very late Seventies to the very early Nineties—and haul them into 2025 to connect with women today? The answer seems to lie in the unexpected. “It’s fascinating that there is such a big array of references to take inspiration from,” he says, “yet what is very important is to not fall into reverence for the archives, because the house has to move forward rather than nostalgically look backwards. That is already sort of a contradiction—I love contradictions and paradoxes, and they exist in the world of Mugler, and in my work too—but I have to take the bull by the horns.”
I tell Freitas that I have two distinct memories of seeing Thierry Mugler’s work firsthand in the 1990s: A blowout, cast-of-thousands extravaganza, all gyrating pyrotechnics; and a tiny showroom presentation with a handful of other editors watching Mugler himself talk through his curvaceous black wool tailoring. Of the two, I tell him, I’d honestly say the latter was more mesmerizing and spectacular—a reminder that for all the camp of the label’s image, it was grounded in an incredible legacy of pure craft. That was uppermost in Freitas’s mind as he worked on his first collection—which, as you will see, has its fair share of impressively executed odes to the hourglass, their shape created purely through cut and surprisingly light in weight. What results is very Mugler, but almost as if he’d swapped Paris for Antwerp—and with what Freitas calls “a severity that’s almost Victorian.”
“Mugler’s exploration of tailoring—the sartorial aspect of his work—is sometimes downplayed in comparison to his showmanship, but it’s extremely important,” he says. “And it’s a link between the house and me, because I’m also a fan of very sharp tailoring, and I had the privilege of working with John [Galliano] and then later Raf [Simons] to learn my craft. But what you just said fascinates me,” he continues, “because Mugler is very multidimensional; it was also not a house which was associated with being safe. And I don’t want to be safe—I really want to explore what that can mean for me at Mugler.”
As it is with all of us, Freitas’s taste is the result of his lived experience. He was born in 1980 in Santarém, Portugal, near Lisbon, and captivated at the age of six by a Portuguese TV-listings magazine of his mother’s which had images of Mugler and Gaultier’s work (“I’d rip them out and keep them in a little folder,” he says). He studied at Central Saint Martins in London in the heady days of the early 2000s, with the genius of Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan well to the fore, and delved into the city’s underground club scene—particularly at Trade and the electroclash night Nag Nag Nag.
He has long been in the thrall of the era’s truly inventive designers—Helmut Lang and Martin Margiela along with Thierry Mugler. Margiela and Mugler were aesthetically apart, I say, but each really knew how to cut a jacket. “Yeah—they were both surgeons in a way,” Freitas says. “They were both interested in deconstructing the body through their cutting, even if they did it very differently.”
Freitas recalls that when he worked for Dries Van Noten, Dries told him that when he and his student friends in Antwerp—Martin Margiela among them—would head to Paris for the shows, Mugler was their dream to get into. “Thierry was a hero for them,” says Freitas, “even if, in the end, they offered a counter-narrative to what he was doing—it’s like, you know, kill your heroes. But when you are in this line of work, it’s important to acknowledge the people who inspired you, who are your heroes—and then at some point you put them on a shelf and then go against the grain.” When you see Freitas’s collection on Vogue Runway, all will become apparent as to how he has both looked to and turned away from those whom he calls his heroes. It’s safe to say he is walking an exhilarating tightrope between what we expect Mugler to be and, precisely, what we wouldn’t.
By now we’ve left his office and are looking at the collection. Sitting in the corner is a mannequin head dressed in the feather headpiece worn by Linda Evangelista in the Mugler-directed video for George Michael’s 1992 hit “Too Funky.” Have you tried it on, Miguel? He bursts out laughing. I’ll take that as a yes—or, at the very least, a maybe. Meanwhile, he’s proud of what’s hanging up, which takes the Mugler legacy and upends it: Where there was sometimes heaviness, now all is lighter in make; what was glittery might still be ornate, but is now matte and graphic and worn with tailoring (Freitas is collaborating with a woman who’s a jeweling genius and used to work with Thierry Mugler himself). There are feathers the color of a 1950s powder puff, or a toy poodle, but for all the drama of them, there’s restraint and rigor, too. (Freitas mentions the plumage looks were made by Maison Fevrier, an atelier which is located behind the Moulin Rouge )
“Mugler was known for this idea of women as otherworldly creatures—intimidating; you couldn’t touch them,” he says. “I wanted to reconfigure that for today’s world and make everything more relatable to more people; to ground everything in reality rather than being larger than life, because the house has struggled with that in the past.” It’s in that same spirit that a divisive term like sexy has been declared verboten in the Mugler atelier, even if it’s the number one adjective everyone always goes to. “I hate the word,” Freitas declares with a grin. “It’s up to us to re-educate people as to what Mugler can be. Sensual—that’s a better way of putting it.”
His show is only days away, and there are still models to be cast and looks to be fitted, but what Freitas keeps coming back to is the opportunity he has been given. “I was so excited to be asked to do the job, and I thought it was a huge challenge, because it is a house with a big name but a small structure,” he says. “We have the mission to rebuild the house, and it’s a full-circle moment for me to work as the creative director. Mugler had such a huge impact on me growing up and wanting to do fashion, and all these years later, I’ve arrived here with the possibility to bring my voice to it—to have my interpretation of what the house can be in 2025, and 2026, and onwards.”