Fashion and corporeal terror go hand-in-hand. What’s scarier than the act of truly seeing oneself...and then having to decide what to wear? A 1983 Vogue cover features the mirror reflection of a woman in Victorian dress with a ghost looming overhead; a 1904 one shows a woman playing cards with a spectre.
Ghoulishness has gone in and out of fashion over the decades, with designers as diverse as Simone Rocha, Thom Browne, Jun Takahashi, Jeremy Scott, and Miuccia Prada all referencing a haunted look in the past several seasons. At the spring 2021 collections, fashion’s apocalyptic obsessions reached a peak. No longer are we merely dressing witchy, with lace veils and pointed-toe boots, we are bracing for hell.
The most literal interpretations of doom came from Givenchy and Maximilian, who both sent out devil horned headpieces. Rick Owens created thigh-high platform boots which he described as waders for navigating a “river of blood.” The usually optimistic Ashish Gupta even stitched “Hail Satan” onto a hoodie—it was a joke, he insists—while Libertine’s Johnson Hartig plastered the phrase “ghosts from our past” on lookbook images.
Designers’ fixation with resurrecting old silhouettes is fully on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Costume Institute exhibit. About Time: Fashion and Duration is intended as a commentary on time and our obsession with defying it, but the show makes an additional point about fashion’s reanimating of the past into a Frankenstein’ed present.
Meanwhile, fashion has been predicting the apocalypse since at least 2008. Deep dive into our runway coverage circa the late ’00s and you’ll find that most reviews begin with an acknowledgment of the “bad times” the world found itself in then: a financial crisis compounded with growing social strife and a shaky political situation. In 2020, it seems safe to say that the apocalyptic reality we have been steeling ourselves for with cake-topper dresses and sequin bell bottoms has well and truly arrived.
How will we cope? Here’s one small idea: Let the ladies lead us. When the full moon crests on October 31, the designer Di Petsa will host a moon workshop for her followers. Turkish-British designer Dilara Findikoglu has long imbued her creations with a wicked beauty. Simone Rocha prefers a catholic terror, while Sarah Burton has turned Alexander McQueen into a place for experimenting with the old magic of the English countryside. Try it out—if you dare.
