The importance of Frankenstein in fashion

A bet: write the best tale of terror. Following this idea a group of writers composed by the doctor and novelist John Polidori, the poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley and his partner, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin challenged themselves. Closed in a house on the shores of Lake Geneva in June 1816, the same that will soon be nicknamed "the year without a summer", they spend their time telling each other curious ghost stories. The gloomy sky, "broken" by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia is flooded with wind, rain and lightning. Meteorologists and real nightmares live into the mind of a young nineteen-year-old girl named Mary (after the marriage Shelley) and take shape from her pen to become the first science fiction novel in history. The labor of childbirth, the loss of new-born children, the illness that from an early age forces her to hold her arm in swaddling clothes, mingle with the many dissertations on philosophy and medicine made with friends before the fire merging into the pages of Frankenstein or the modern Prometeo, published anonymously in 1817 and with the author's name only in the second edition of 1831. The theme of creation and painful monstrosity are just some of the nuances that make the story of Baron Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the unhappy aristocrat and tormented, who, confident in the progress of modern science, wants to create a human being, intelligent, but incapable of feeling pain, but ending up giving life to an unhappy creature, burned by loneliness and by the rejection of others.

A character so iconic and psychologically complex to be presented again in dozens and dozens of cinematographic works: from the famous 1930s trilogy with Boris Karloff to the one directed by Kenneth Branagh starring Robert DeNiro, from the cult parody Frankenstein Junior directed by Mel Brooks to the dark-romantic version that appeared in the beautiful TV series Penny Dreadful.

Not only cinema and TV have remained deeply marked by this unnamed monster, mistakenly, but by now commonly, called with the name of its creator, but also the fashion world where the term "Frankenstein" indicates a garment made with different fabrics, patterns and cuts sewn together. If Sacai's Chitose Abe is considered the designer who defined the contemporary Frankenstein dress, many have followed the example, from Junya Watanabe to Henry Holland.

Sacai

Sacai

Holland

The dark and tormented figure of the monster inspired, after a fashion show, more or less explicitly the work of many designers. Just look at the latest collections to notice. Prada, both in the female and male versions of its FW19 collection, personal anatomy of a love story, has reworked the themes of fear and love by paying homage to the protagonist of Shelley's novel, transformed into a print with the help of the illustrator Jeanne Dentallante.

Prada

Prada

Prada

Prada

Prada

Alessandro Michele, explaining the theme behind Gucci FW18 show (the one with the severed heads), said "we are all Frankenstein of our life"; while Francesco Risso from Marni said that his SS19 collection was born from a strange question: "What if Dr. Frankenstein brought the Venus de Milo back to life?" The result is a series of flesh-colored dresses made up of strips of fabric and visible, almost surgical sewers that bring to mind the SS09 proposal by Rodarte and, above all, the bustier made by Alexander McQueen for the spring-summer 1999. Creations that seem to replicate, although in a more delicate and refined version, the procedure used by the doctor to assemble his being, a perfect example of the word Frankenstein used in the meaning given to it by fashion. 

Alexander McQueen

Marni

Rodarte

Christopher Kane

Sometimes, however, the homage to Mary Shelley's book and her character is more subtle, evoked by a silhouette, a mood. If you happened to look at models with square shoulders, heavy shoes and black dresses on Alexander Wang FW15 catwalk, Thom Browne's menswear for the FW12 or some Rick Owens creations, it's almost inevitable that she appeared before the eyes the image of one of the many Frankestein seen in the movies.

Alexander Wang

Thom Browne

Rick Owens

Rick Owens

Rick Owens

There is something in Gothic novels that torments and inspires art, cinema and fashion in an eternal way. It does not matter whether it is Frankenstein or the equally iconic Bram Stoker's Dracula, reworking these characters who are at the same time romantic, dark and immediate to recognize is how to exorcise their fears, mirror the turbid, the pain mixed with hope that pervades every human.