To steer Mugler is a titanic undertaking, since the founder’s otherworldly heroines still set the terms on which fashion dreams of the future. Miguel Castro Freitas, a Portuguese designer formed at Dior and Dries Van Noten and appointed in 2025, answers that weight with a cycle named A Trilogy of Glorified Clichés, where each chapter seizes a commonplace and crowns it. First came showgirl glamour for his debut, then the language of power and uniform drawn from the House’s archives, and now, for Spring-Summer 2027, untamed nature, one of Manfred Thierry Mugler’s most faithful muses.
Allure runs hot, from a python print bustier dress that opens low, framing the derrière like a plunging neckline, to fully covered silhouettes whose high collars climb beyond the throat, each one radiating raw command. The creature striding here escapes every taxonomy. A cascade of long hair by Charlie Le Mindu falls as a skirt beneath a jacket sharpened at the shoulders, and a fitted black suit rises into twin feather antennae. Patterns lifted from the animal and vegetal kingdoms were magnified until their origins blurred. Gloves in saffron, emerald or purple seem dipped in pigment.
In January 1997, Mugler himself signed Les Insectes, a Haute Couture masterpiece that bent nature to couture’s will. Almost 30 years on, its spirit subtly infuses this proposal. Laces climb a burgundy corset skirt that swirls above a trim of plumes, and shoulders swell into padded pods above waists drawn tight. A sheer web of gold threads melts into mint green fringes that trail to the ankles, leaving the body almost bare. Belted tunics and flared trousers are each worn in one unbroken colour.
Three acts complete one portrait of the Mugler woman, first admired, then obeyed, and at last feared. Around her, two Björk songs, Possibly Maybe and Venus as a Boy, return as images reworked by Casper Sejersen and multiplied across 32 screens. The House could not have found a better fit to hypnotically wrap the collection than the icon who seems to have transcended the human to reach its most accomplished form.
