Spring

For Mugler’s new creative director Miguel Castro Freitas, the dream of the brand is Paris—but there’s always room in his head (and heart) for Antwerp. Today marked the showing of Freitas’s debut collection, in a shadowy brutalist underground car park in Paris’s hip but with an edge 11eme arrondissement. The venue took me back to the late ’90s, when you knew something conceptual and uncompromising was afoot, usually involving the influx of Belgian designers to the city. (A fantastic and early—1998—Olivier Theyskens show in a dankly menacing industrial space with swinging lightbulbs lives on in my mind.)

For Freitas, the thinking was that the venue would be all the better to showcase, via the power of contrast, his precise and exacting vision of Mugler. That meant the house’s iconic hourglass silhouette—a rolling, exaggerated topography of shoulder, waist and hip—rendered in strict double face wool or satin tailoring in shades of concrete gray and a pinky beige not unlike that of a 1950s T. Leclerc face powder. Freitas also wanted to lean into the exemplary handwork Mugler was once renowned for, and which he is looking to restore to its name: elaborate jeweled bodices, as if you were wearing a chandelier, but denuded of any sparkle and shine by virtue of the fact they’re in the same matte colors of his suiting; and, feathers—from a curvaceous 1940s-esque chubby in frou-frou marabou (like a fantasy of Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce), to a jacket sprouting exotic plumes, as if the model wearing it was mid transformation from someone human to something avian.

Freitas’s debut lands, of course, amidst a whole slew of new starts, not just in Paris but also Milan. (Twelve, if you’ve been paying attention to Vogue Runway’s leader board—and if you’ve not, you really should!) Given some of the marquee household names involved there’s been a lot of noise, as well as the big question of how a designer makes the brand they’re now leading speak the language of 2025. In Freitas’s case, he’s faced with much the same challenge as Dario Vitale is with Versace: honor and celebrate the incredible legacy of the house you’ve been gifted, but also find a way to add your name above the door, which is not so easy because both houses are blessed with extraordinary and extraordinarily identifiable brand images. If Vitale remixed all the things he loved about Gianni Versace’s work and reimagined it for Gen Z, Freitas instead first found common ground between him and Thierry Mugler via their shared love of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Movies, Freitas said at a preview I had with him a few days before the show and wrote about here, provided him with a theoretical framework for the collection. But then he brought his own aesthetic outlook and preferences to bear on the proceedings. So yes to va-voom Mugler valkyries, but also a resounding yes to the cool nocturnal creatures of fashion’s 1990s era of Flemish deconstruction.

What all of that meant in practice: minimalist second skin body suits with skirts exploding with feathers, or draped in a very mid-century couture manner; exaggerated nip-waist coats and dresses in black patent; and, a scrolled rosette motif on a rather fabulous black leather dress with next spring’s de rigeur off the shoulder décolleté, the neckline standing away from the body as if inflated outwards. What became clear with this first outing of Freitas’s is that we are about to see an awful lot of Mugler walking red carpets the world over: in a gleaming gilded pant suit whose jacket had built in gloves, say, or the Mugler Angel-like silver stars adorning a body suit worn with pin sharp pants, or as a constellation over a sheer draped dress. All very Mugler, and all very Freitas, and all very likely to garner attention. Going forward, though, it would be nice to see him lean into a less conceptualized vision of the brand, because he has the talent and making skills to do so; to let his tailoring still come to the fore but with more of an eye to the everyday life of women, even it’s an exalted version of it. And speaking of; next time let’s get out of the darkness of today’s venue, to shine a light more clearly on Mugler’s new era.