Fashion can be a lot of things—glamorous, elegant, cool, fun, sexy—but can it also be … scary? An interesting thought to consider as Halloween approaches. And the answer is, well, of course.
As one of life’s great mysteries, it’s no big surprise that fashion does grapple, from time to time, with ideas of death and the afterlife. It can bring people closer to their most authentic selves,” says French haute couturier and fashion designer Charlie Le Mindu. I sometimes wonder why we need to approach the end of life to begin living with that level of honesty.” But Le Mindu is hardly the only designer to have confronted his own fears of death through fashion—designers have long used this medium to wrestle with what is paradoxically both life’s only guarantee and one of its greatest mysteries.
Across cultures and eras, fashion has served as a means of reflecting on this universal human experience, giving tangible form to the otherwise incomprehensible. From Ann Demeulemeester’s spring 2019 gothic veils inspired by L’Inconnue de la Seine to Alexander McQueen’s spring 2008 tribute to his late friend and champion Isabella Blow, some have drawn on the visual language of funerary dress, while others have transformed the runway into meditations on grief. With Halloween steadfastly approaching, we revisit nine collections that explore the many ways fashion has confronted death—and, in turn, what it means to be alive.
Alexander McQueen, fall 1996, “Dante” “It is important to look at death because it is a part of life,” Alexander McQueen told Nick Knight in a 2009 SHOWstudio interview. Few designers embraced that fascination more fervently than McQueen, whose work repeatedly grappled with mortality, violence, religion, and the afterlife, particularly in his eighth runway collection, Dante, which propelled him to international acclaim. Named after the Italian poet whose Divine Comedy journeys through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, the fall 1996 collection explored the intersection of religion, warfare, and historical mourning traditions.
Dedicated to his close friend and muse Isabella Blow, the show unfolded on a crucifix-shaped runway inside London's candlelit Christ Church Spitalfields, where a skeleton watched from the front row as the spectacle unfolded to a haunting soundtrack punctuated by gunfire. McQueen juxtaposed religious imagery with the brutality of war, incorporating Don McCullin's photographs of the Vietnam War into garments alongside ecclesiastical tailoring, bumster trousers, and thorn-like headpieces. Among the most striking pieces was a lilac silk-faille corset embellished with black lace and jet beading, drawing directly on the colors and materials of Victorian mourning dress.
Alexander McQueen, fall 2006, “The Widows of Culloden” A decade later, McQueen’s fall 2006 collection, The Widows of Culloden, painted historical loss through an elegiac runway that he described as “romantic but melancholic and austere at the same time.” A tribute to the women widowed by the 1746 Battle of Culloden, which devastated the Scottish Highlands, the deeply personal collection drew on McQueen’s Scottish ancestry through family tartans, black lace, feathers, and mourning-inspired silhouettes. Its haunting finale featured a spectral Kate Moss floating inside a glass pyramid, conjured through a 19th-century illusion known as Pepper’s Ghost. The collection exemplified what curator Andrew Bolton has described as McQueen’s gift for “finding poetry and beauty in death,” a sensibility that permeated his work throughout his career.
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