While the Mugler x H&M collaboration, launching in spring 2023, has brought together many of the French luxury house’s best-sellers to offer them en masse, you might be wondering which direction its artistic director Casey Cadwallader will move in. After having excessively exploited the groove of the shapewear with the clippings, including the tracksuits seen on all the pop stars in the sector, he now pursues another trend: that of the bestiary, an imagery so dear to the founder Manfred Thierry Mugler.
Paris Hilton and Angela Bassett, lying at the Mugler Spring-Summer 2024 show
It was at the Carrousel du Louvre on October 2, 2023 that Casey Cadwallader presented his Mugler spring-summer 2024 collection, full of fashion’s least expected animals: jellyfish, octopus and other squid. In a minimalist environment, composed of a white podium and background, models walked in front of fans letting their clothes float like tentacles in the ocean. Enough to create a look that is as ethereal as it is menacing, for the models in the booth, including some celebrities such as Angela Bassett and Paris Hilton.
The first look consisted, for example, of a shiny black resin bodysuit with exaggerated hips, decorated with a simple M, over a pair of sheer tights and a shaded train. Several black looks followed, with very square shoulders and equally straight cuts, before a bit of nude and sheer roundness intruded through slip dresses and other dressing gowns. Spotted denim pieces, reminiscent of a polar leopard or sea snails, were among the first forays into colour, soon followed by looks in shades of beige, orange and pink. A detail already present in the touches was then accentuated: luminous tufts of optical fibers, similar to lamps, decorate the chest, wrists or even shoes, to create the appearance of an electric anemone or bioluminescent plankton. Other silhouettes take up this idea in the form of more fluid and colorful fringes, on the bottom of the sleeves or trousers, creating an effect of a multitude of tentacles à la Ursula in The little Mermaid.
Mugler spring-summer 2024: “Swim straight”
The aquatic dimension of the silhouettes it is also played out through the colorless transparencies of the bodysuits or the peplum belts on which the skirts rest. Finally, the minimalism of the scenography reveals all its effectiveness in the last passages: mermaid dresses or bodysuits that could almost appear simple if they were not made up of muslin trains more than 7 meters long, like dangerous moray eels swimming on the ground or streaks of ink of octopus. It was Anok Yai (voted model of the year 2022 by models.com), who closed this spectacular show and which could have a vast influence on the rest of the industry.
Source: Madmoizelle
Mary Crossley is an author at “The Fashion Vibes”. She is a seasoned journalist who is dedicated to delivering the latest news to her readers. With a keen sense of what’s important, Mary covers a wide range of topics, from politics to lifestyle and everything in between.
