Fashion’s Most Theatrical Moments: Runway Dark Fantasy
From McQueen's carousel of clowns to Galliano's spectral dolls, the most imaginative designers have long mined the macabre and fantastical for inspiration. Here, a collection of archival runway moments that blur the line between haute couture and theatrical performance.
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There exists within fashion an enduring appetite for the theatrical, the surreal, and the delightfully unsettling. For decades, the medium’s most visionary designers have understood that the runway is not merely a stage for clothing, but a canvas for storytelling, where silhouette and spectacle merge into something altogether more profound than the garments themselves.
Martine Sitbon grasped this truth in the early nineties, when she sent Kate Moss down the runway as a gothic apparition, layered in mesh and adorned with trinkets that seemed to accumulate like secrets. The collection drew from the eclecticism of the seventies, constructing a mood of grunge tinged witchcraft that felt both darkly playful and deeply considered.
John Galliano has long been a master of narrative dress, staging his collections as immersive theatrical experiences. For his own label’s autumn winter show in 2007, he created a Parisian fever dream populated by doll like figures in silhouettes reminiscent of Paul Poiret’s pioneering constructions. Later, during his tenure at Maison Margiela, he orchestrated a couture presentation as pure theatre, complete with headwear ranging from cowboy hats to witch’s crowns and even a pumpkin, each piece a character in an unfolding narrative.
Alexander McQueen’s relationship with darkness was more visceral still. His 2001 collection, ‘What a Merry Go Round’, staged upon a dilapidated carousel, introduced clowns and carnivals filtered through historical and militaristic reference. It was a pivotal moment, not least for the emergence of the skull motif that would become iconic to his legacy.
The macabre has continued to captivate contemporary design. Alessandro Michele’s tenure at Gucci saw models parading with replicas of their own heads, a surreal commentary on identity and representation, whilst later a jewel encrusted skeleton emerged from the label’s Cruise collection, staged within an old burial ground south of France. This was fashion as archaeology, as séance, as something altogether more mystical than commerce.
Thierry Mugler’s couture parade of insects, complete with antennae and wasp waisted silhouettes, transformed the human form into something otherworldly. Daniel Roseberry’s faux taxidermy collection brought replica leopard, wolf and lion pieces to the runway, referencing the natural world through a lens of artifice and spectacle.
Viktor and Rolf masked their models beneath larger than life doll’s heads in their 2017 couture presentation, whilst Robert Wun embroidered blood red crystals onto white satin like macabre handprints. Even Ludovic de Saint Sernin discovered something unsettling in the barely there delicacy of a spiderweb vest, transformed through sparkle into something simultaneously fragile and menacing.
These are not costumes, though they have occasionally masqueraded as such. Rather, they represent fashion’s refusal to remain decorative, its insistence on engaging with darkness, theatre, and the imagination as seriously as with seams and silhouette. They remind us that the runway remains one of culture’s most potent stages for the expression of something far stranger and more compelling than mere clothing.
Imagery courtesy of Harvey Nichols (@harveynichols).
