H&M x Mugler promises to be the hottest collaboration of spring

When Karl Lagerfeld announced he would sign a limited edition collection with the Swedish fast fashion giant in 2004, it sounded groundbreaking: one of the first masstige collections (a contraction of prestige and mass: prestigious collections mass-produced and aimed at the mass market, contrary to to the habits of luxury) of the history of fashion. But it was by no means new, given that Azzedine Alaïa had already done it with Tati in 1991, for example. Since then H&M has been inviting houses and designers for almost twenty years to revisit their archives to bring out a sort of best-of at a much lower price than usual. Think in particular of Lanvin (around Alber Elbaz), Isabel Marant, Maison Margiela and Olivier Rousteing for Balmain. He has almost become a must.

So when H&M made it official on February 22, 2023 that its next collaboration would be with the Mugler house, artistically directed by Casey Cadwallader (and now owned by L’Oréal), this was not surprising. But fans of sculpting second-skin dresses and jackets with open shoulders the eighties I definitely can’t wait to be able to do it soon shop this H&M x Mugler collaboration next spring!

Who is Casey Cadwallader, artistic director of Mugler who signs the collaboration with H&M?

Sharp tailoring laced with maddening lingerie: Mugler silhouettes under the watchful eye of Casey Cadwallader wield the art of blending genres to enhance them to the fullest. For its officially feminine collections, both women and men of all sizes parade. As during its spring-summer 2020 show in which transsexuals and intersex, artists subway like Kembra Pfahler, but also ordinary people like this pastry chef who made a splash with high heels, carbon pants and long black gloves to better emphasize the nakedness of her torso: the Venus de Milo can dress like Mugler.

Founded in 1974 by the now deceased Manfred Thierry Mugler, the house was suppressed in 2003, then revived in 2010 by Nicola Formichetti (Lady Gaga’s stylist), replaced by David Koma in 2014, and now Casey Cadwallader since 2017. This expert architect, who has worked for Marc Jacobs, Narciso Rodriguez and Acne Studios, reconciles the extravagant couture heritage with today’s reality and even brings Mugler back to the stage with his costumes for Beyoncé or Dua Lipa. Celebrities such as Cardi B and Kim Kardashian regularly dig into the house’s archives, recently enriched by a retrospective exhibition dedicated to the late founder of the blue-starred house, so much so that Mugler appears today on everyone’s lips, but perhaps soon on everyone’s buttocks too, thanks to this collaboration with H&M.

What to expect from the H&M x Mugler collaboration due out for spring?

Casey Cadwallader has greatly contributed to popularize the diversion of technical materials to make amazing clothes such as sculpting lingerie. Try to use durable materials and new construction techniques such as laser cutting, embossing (a technique similar to thermoforming to create reliefs in the material), welding and gluing, in order to create architectural and elastic pieces that serve all landforms. Making a couture dress out of the same fabric as running shorts is innovative.

Casey Cadallader’s Mugler silhouette is therefore recognizable by the exaggerated shoulders and cinched waist. And her clothes like to show what we usually hide: their construction. This therefore involves assemblies of more or less elastic materials to slightly compress the body at strategic points to refine the waist, lift the breasts and buttocks, for example. This shaping uses the principle of corsets and girdles, but much more comfortable, because in flexible materials that accompany the movements. Hence the fact that so many singers love to wear catsuit Mugler will perform on stage. But this technical challenge wants to flatter a maximum of morphologies, which runs counter to many large French houses, and which we can therefore hope to find from H&M, in spring 2023.

The availability date of this H&M x Mugler collaboration has not yet been made official.

Front page photos: left to right, singer Yseult, Mugler artistic director Casey Cadwallader, H&M creative director Ann-Sofie Johansson and singer Dua Lipa. © Mugler’s Instagram screenshot; H&M.