Fashion Gave Women Back Their Teeth

Fashion has been doing something to the female body that most people didn't want to name. Not softening it. Not beautifying it in any conventional sense — building it into something that exceeds the human. The body that crosses its own boundaries has been fashion's subject for decades. It just stopped being polite about it.

Alexander McQueen understood this before almost anyone else. In 1999, he put Shalom Harlow on a rotating platform and had robotic arms spray-paint her dress while she spun — black and acidic chartreuse arcing across white fabric, transforming the garment into something violent and strange. His Plato's Atlantis collection sent women down the runway dissolving into deep-sea creatures, their bodies becoming something primordial. McQueen's women weren't there to be looked at approvingly. When his house dressed Lana Del Rey for the 2024 Met Gala — hawthorn branches hand-embroidered across the bodice, a headdress of real branches and tulle, boots designed to resemble hooves — it was the same impulse, twenty-five years on.

What's changed is who controls the framing.

Dilara Fındıkoğlu does it with the explicit language of the occult: corsets that look like ribcages, veils that suggest shrouding rather than adornment. She takes the symbols that once got women burned and makes them the structure of the garment itself. Her garments carry the history of what got women punished. Being too much. Being too dark. Taking up the wrong kind of space.

Iris van Herpen arrives at the same idea from somewhere else. Her garments grow, branch, and fossilize, suggesting coral reefs, nervous systems, the insides of bodies you've never seen. Where Fındıkoğlu works with cultural memory, van Herpen works with biology, or something that looks like it evolved beyond biology. The women who wear her work don't look human in the traditional sense.

Thierry Mugler was already there. His exoskeleton silhouettes, his insect bodies, women fused with armor — Mugler's runway was always a negotiation between the female body and something inhuman. Rei Kawakubo went further: her 1997 Comme des Garçons collection sent out garments with “lumps and bumps” built into the fabric itself, literally deforming the silhouette into something irregular and unruly. Paris didn't know what to do with it. When the Met Gala dedicated its 2017 exhibition to her work, the institution was essentially admitting it had taken twenty years to catch up.

The monstrous feminine runs through Medusa, through the witch trials, through the femme fatale of noir. Fashion's offer to women has always come with conditions. We'll make you beautiful. But only if you stay containable. The darkness in these designers' work isn't a finish applied at the end. It was always the material.

Every generation assumes its beauty ideals make sense. Kawakubo's lumps felt like a provocation in 1997. Now they look obvious. That's not because fashion got braver. It's because something shifted in what women are allowed to say out loud about themselves.