Haunted couture: dressing like a ghost has captured the zeitgeist

The Guardian

a day ago

'The look of the summer is going to be kind of haunted,' wrote fashion editor Rachel Tashjian in her newsletter, Opulent Tips, this April. Without a crystal ball – or holding a seance – she couldn't have known Dior's Resort 26 collection would be made up of spectral gowns and accompanied by a film featuring ghosts called Les Fantômes du Cinéma. And yet, here we are.
In Rome, for her final show with Dior on 28 May, Maria Grazia Chiuri issued female attendees an all-white dress code (men were asked to dress in black), then each look on the runway at the 18th-century Villa Albani Torlonia was more ethereal than the last. The final three: a white tulle gown that was only half there; a high-necked dress beaded so it moved like snakeskin; and another in embellished silver as resplendent as Tolkien's mithril.
When translated off the runway, haunted couture is aptly phantasmic (read: hard to define). It is a mishmash of last year's bloomer obsession, underwear-as-outerwear and cottagecore, each with a tatty edge. It's a worn-out wedding dress or a dishevelled, see-through gown. It's floaty, sumptuous fabric – silk chiffon, taffeta, lace – but the styling is a little chaotic – an exposed, extravagant bra strap or a nighty worn out-of-the-house. It's sexy matron: full skirts, full sleeves and high necklines, but without a slip so everyone can see your underwear.
'It's a party at the end of the world,' says Catherine Spooner, a professor at the University of Lancaster, who is writing a book about the white dress in Gothic literature and film. She believes the trend is fuelled by global political tensions. 'The French Revolution is culturally significant at this particular moment,' she says, referencing growing income inequality. 'Marie Antoinette really pioneered underwear as outerwear.' The last queen of France caused a scandal when she had her portrait painted wearing a white loose-fitting undergarment in 1783.
Spooner cites multiple historical influences that have informed the spectral aesthetic. The white shrouds people were once buried in, because their clothes were valuable and had to be reused; a famous 1830s Parisian production of Hamlet where Ophelia wore white as she went insane. 'But I think the most important influential figure … is not actually a ghost, it's Miss Havisham in Great Expectations,' she says.
The enduring image of Dickens' jilted spinster roaming a dilapidated mansion in her ragged wedding dress was evident on the runways during Australian fashion week (AFW) last month. Beare Park's collection closed with two long white dresses. One was a slip dress so deconstructed it fell open across the side of the body, the other was an off-the-shoulder white gown in stiff silk taffeta worn by a grey-haired model.
Designer Courtney Zheng showed a floor-length chiffon dress in pale grey with a fluid, full skirt. The dress was so sheer the model's underwear added to the silhouette, while a loose piece of chiffon wrapped around the model's neck like a scarf, draping across the line of the bust. She calls these romantic looks historical yet timeless. 'I'm drawn to eerie elegance.'
Other looks remind Spooner of the schoolgirls who disappear in the film Picnic at Hanging Rock. These include a simple, white cotton poplin dress from Zheng's collection with a built-in bullet bra inspired by vintage underpinnings; and Amy Lawrence's use of undyed silk with faggoting which gives the impression that parts of each long, white dress are floating. 'It's just been rereleased for the 50th anniversary so it's sort of back in the cultural consciousness,' Spooner says.
The mysterious film also inspired Zimmermann's AW25 collection, Hypnotic, which was presented at Paris fashion week back in March. But somehow the brand's crochet, pompoms and paisley silks remain more boho than spectral, whereas Chemena Kamali's Chloé – the home of the bloomer and floating chiffon resurgence – manages to be both.
Spooner says Picnic at Hanging Rock's original release in 1975 coincided with a period when the white dress was everywhere in fashion. 'There are other parallels happening with the early 70s now,' she says. 'The hippy, flower-power movement and climate change' alongside this 'retrograde femininity' that we're seeing with the rise of rightwing politics.
At Nicol & Ford's AFW show, the feeling of haunting was deliberate. The colour progressively drained from each look so that, by the show's end, dresses were translucent and tattered, as though the wearer was being erased. The collection was a commentary on the 'conservative political swing, resulting in a roll-back of protection for gender diverse communities', designers Lilian and Katie-Louise Nicol-Ford say.
In this context ghostly garb might feel nihilistic – designed for a sad, debaucherous, final-days party – but Spooner says solace can be found in small rebellions. Since it 'feels inappropriate because it's often overtly intimate' haunted couture is 'implicitly revolutionary as well'.