时装如何面对死亡：从 McQueen 到 Wiederhoeft，秀场里的哀悼与重生

October 27, 2026

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.

“I have always found it interesting that death often reveals something profoundly human. It can bring people closer to their most authentic selves,” says French creative director, costume designer, and hair and makeup artist Charlie Le Mindu. “The prospect of losing everything changes our understanding of what is important. 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 their 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 story of 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. Here, we revisit nine collections that explore the many ways fashion has confronted death—and, in turn, what it means to be alive.

“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 thornlike 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.

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.

Charlie Le Mindu fall 2010, Sex Religion Bullshit Lucifer

Charlie Le Mindu’s fall 2010 collection, Sex Religion Bullshit Lucifer, grappled with his own mortality during a period of deteriorating health. “Rather than approaching death as something tragic, I became interested in the strange freedom that comes with accepting its inevitability,” recalls the French hairstylist and designer, who has also collaborated with brands including Balmain, Mugler, and Vivienne Westwood, and styled artists such as Lady Gaga, Cindy Sherman, Julia Fox, and more. “I wanted to celebrate it, not because I wished to die, but because I had never felt such an urgency to live.” Questioning the religious and moral structures that teach us to fear death, Le Mindu embraced Lucifer as a symbol of society’s anxieties surrounding desire and disobedience through his signature haute coiffure, in a collection of hair constructions, towering jeweled crosses, and mourning veils. Among its most striking creations was an oversized black lacquered rose fascinator, which Gaga wore later in the year. “Something that began with the possibility of dying ultimately changed the way I approached being alive,” he reflects. “The collection was never really about death itself, but about the extraordinary value we give to life once we understand that it is finite. I wonder why we need to approach the end of life to begin living with that level of honesty.”

For her fall 2011 haute couture collection, Capriole, Dutch designer Iris van Herpen found inspiration in the sensation of free-falling during a parachute jump. Exploring the tension between freedom and fear in a moment suspended between life and death, the 19-look collection featured a striking white 3D-printed skeleton dress, developed in collaboration with architect Isaïe Bloch and Belgian 3D-printing company Materialise. Constructed from laser-sintered polyamide, its bonelike structure enveloped the body like an exoskeleton. “This dress visualizes the inside of the body outside,” van Herpen explained to Vogue. “To me it represents freedom and imperfection, and between those two is where beauty can be found.” Later acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and featured in its “Manus x Machina” exhibition, and now on view at “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses” at the Brooklyn Museum, the piece transformed a traditional symbol of mortality into an expression of liberation.

For fall 2012, Thom Browne took the expression “dying for fashion” literally, staging an elaborate funeral tableau complete with flickering candles and 10 coffins containing, as an officiant announced, “10 beautiful girls who died for fashion.” The models subsequently emerged from their coffins, resurrected by their love of clothing, in extravagant ensembles featuring exaggerated hourglass silhouettes, embroidery, and gilded embellishments. Juxtaposing the solemnity of Victorian mourning with his characteristically surreal theatricality, Browne transformed the runway into a narrative about fashion’s power to bring its devotees back to life.

For Comme des Garçons’ fall 2015 collection, The Ceremony of Separation, Rei Kawakubo explored an abstract interpretation of loss through 18 sculptural looks in black, white, and gold, colors associated with burial across different traditions. Models approached, passed, and separated from one another as though enacting a final parting between the living and the dead in voluminous constructions of intricate lace, oversized bows, and densely layered fabrics that enveloped the body. Among the standout looks were a white dress resembling bundles of bedsheets tied with bows, a tiered gold lace structure recalling religious vestments, and a black ensemble adorned with miniature Victorian-style children’s dresses and bonnets. The show culminated in a voluminous black tulle cocoon, its shroudlike silhouette reinforcing the collection’s meditation on mortality.

For Ann Demeulemeester’s spring 2019 collection, creative director Sébastien Meunier found inspiration in the story of L’Inconnue de la Seine, a mysterious young woman allegedly pulled from the Seine in the late 19th century, whose death mask has fascinated artists for generations. Meunier, who keeps a replica of the mask in his apartment, translated his fascination with her into a hauntingly romantic collection of diaphanous, nightdress-like gowns, fluid tailoring, and trailing silhouettes. Models walked with their faces obscured by veils in billowing black-and-white dresses, gauzy blouses, and long coats with an unfinished, waterlogged finish. Some of the most recognized looks were a sheer white dress layered beneath leather straps and chains, pale pink gowns cinched with harnesses, and tailored jackets adorned with clusters of flowers, evoking the spectral beauty of the drowned woman. “We don’t know a lot about her, so you can dream up lots of things and transpose your own world on it,” Meunier told Vogue.

Alessandro Michele staged Gucci’s cruise 2019 show, which explored what he described as “the idea of death as fascination,” after dark in the Alyscamps, an ancient Roman necropolis in Arles, France. The burial ground was transformed into what the house called a “party in a cemetery” against a backdrop of flames, tolling bells, and stone sarcophagi, and models appeared as mourning widows in velvet gowns and capes alongside skeleton-embroidered garments and leggings bearing the word memento mori. Among the most memorable ensembles were a black gown with a skeletal rib cage embroidered across the torso and a floral cape paired with a cathedral-like headdress, injecting funerary imagery into Michele’s signature maximalism.

Named after a river of the Greek underworld depicted in Dante’s Inferno as a torrent of boiling blood, Rick Owens’s Phlegethon visualized the anxieties of the pandemic and environmental crisis. Presented amid fog and flashing lights outside Venice’s Lido Casino, the dystopian collection featured towering thigh-high platform boots resembling waders, an allusion to both the mythical river and the city’s rising waters. Armor-like shoulders, oversized sleeveless jackets, and leather micro-shorts contrasted with sheer silk chiffon, fishnet dresses, and sculptural tulle ruffles. Against a largely black palette, flashes of alarm red and bubblegum pink heightened the collection’s apocalyptic ethos. Owens described the imposing shoulders as an “exaggerated middle finger to doom,” framing the collection as an act of defiance. “In the face of adversity…we have to pull ourselves up,” he said.

Drawing on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Jackson Wiederhoeft’s fall 2023 collection imagined a subversive afterlife in which the heroine refuses to be rescued from the underworld. “In our version of the story, Eurydice chooses hell,” said the designer. “We explore a post-Orpheus, post-gender underworld where interpretations of ancient Greek and Catholic mythologies meet at the intersection of Virgil’s Aeneid. A Venn diagram of fanaticism, fate, fear. Afterparty versus afterlife, prey versus predator, friend versus foe, fate versus free will. Fate as a consequence of free will.” Staged as an operatic spectacle, the collection opened with a voluminous white gown fashioned from plasticized taffeta, its sheer bodice revealing a tightly cinched corset beneath. Shimmering gold-sequined dresses, corseted denim, and a coat embroidered with stained-glass-like sequins further blurred the boundaries between gothic romance and extravagance, while sheer slip dresses featured hand-embroidered, tattoo-like imagery referencing the myth of Orpheus and other Catholic iconography.