Every time Mickey Mouse was spotted on the catwalk

A pair of ears that the Times described as «one of the greatest icons of the 20th and 21st centuries», eight fingers clad in off-white gloves as opposed to a pitch-black silhouette, and a hyper-pop verve conceived one night in the Laugh-O-Gram Studio: we are talking about Mickey Mouse. His creator, Walt Disney, introduced him in 1928 for the short film Steamboat Willie drawing inspiration from a real-life mouse - «I became particularly fond of a brown pet mouse. He was a shy little fellow. By touching him on the nose with a pencil, I trained him to run inside a black circle that I had drawn on my table,» Walt Disney himself recounted. When he first spoke, in the short film The Karnival Kid, Mickey Mouse pronounced a telegraphic 'Hot Dogs', which struck a chord with children all over the world - ice cream cones, watches, slippers and underwear began clamouring for Mickey's image. Despite taking his first steps in an economic scenario marked by the Wall Street crash, Mickey Mouse established an instantly profitable relationship with the world of fashion, which is still reflected in new collaborations. From the end of 2023, Disney, despite having managed to extend the expiry of exclusive rights on Mickey Mouse twice, will no longer be able to do so on the Mickey Mouse version Steamboat Willie (1927) while preserving the copyright on later versions

Let's take a look back at Mickey Mouse's legacy in the world of fashion: streetwear, slogans, naïve attitude and punk deviations.

The Mickey Mouse hat 

Museum of American History

As demand grew for merchandising in his likeness, Disney decided to hire a Kansas City publicist, Herman 'Kay' Kamen, in 1932 to oversee all licensing aspects of copyright protection. Thus, in 1955, Disney launched the first mouse ears hats, showing how the aesthetic imagery traced by Mickey Mouse was not only a huge source of revenue, but also the most valuable intellectual property owned by the US company.

Mickey Mouse in punk and pop culture 

Vivienne Westwood, Met Museum

Twiggy

Jamie Lee Curtis

John Lennon

Michael Jackson

Joan Jett

Lisa Bonet

The Outsiders

The link between Mickey Mouse and fashion, like all true mass sociological phenomena, starts from the spontaneity of the street and ends up imposing itself on the catwalks of all the fashion capitals. Before we get to the shots of actress Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz immortalised on the street in 1987 with a human-sized puppet of the anthropomorphic mouse par excellence, digging on the web brings us a portrait of thirteen-year-old Michael Jackson wearing a Mickey Mouse print tee. That model in grey cotton thus landed on John Lennon, Jamie Lee Curtis and Emilio Estevez in the film The Outsiders (1982): the image of Mickey Mouse, although not codified by fashion in the strict sense, is already fixed in the collective memory of the 20th century. Merit, perhaps, to the punk reinterpretation developed in the 1980s by Vivienne Westwood who, with the Mickey and Minnie dress, imagined and imprinted on white cotton the intercourse between the world's most famous pair of mice.

Mickey Mouse and y2K

Number (N)ine

Hysteric Glamour

Dolce&Gabbana

It was at the turn of the 1990s and early 2000s that fashion made Mickey Mouse a paradigmatic case, putting an end to the old querelle pitting pop against the conceptually snobbish, the high and the low. If, for creatives such as Jeremy Scott, Bobby Abley or Marc Jacobs, Mickey Mouse constituted the natural interlocutor of a shrewd and more or less disengaged fashion, for others Mickey Mouse functioned as a catalyst for previously unknown reactions. For Number (N)ine, in 2000, it was a restyling operation of the corny and naive image of Mickey Mouse: inspired by rock star Eddie Vedder, the character assumed the pose of Pearl Jam's frontman and became the champion of grunge in the tee and hoodie category now heavily sought after on Vinted. Remaining in Japan, where in the cult video game Kingdom Hearts Mickey Mouse is the king of Disney Castle, one cannot fail to mention the varsity jacket by Hysteric Glamour in vogue in the 90s with the character's print of clear Disney matrix. The same imagery has been taken up by brands such as Dolce&Gabbana which, in the FW04 fashion show, sketches the love story between Mickey Mouse and Minnie on a cream-coloured crinoline skirt already dug up by TikTok users.

Mickey Mouse on the catwalk

Jean-Charles de Castelbajac

Comme des Garçons FW13

Marc Jacobs SS13

2010 was the turn of the Mickey Hi, the trainers developed by adidas and Jeremy Scott for Disney based on a vintage model of the German brand, the Eldorado. In the same year, it was the Italian brand Iceberg, with the SS10 collection and then with Resort 2012, to relaunch the verve of Mickey Mouse, an energy that manifested for more than ninety years by Mickey Mouse, which the master of colour Charles de Castelbajac also used for his brand Jean-Charles de Castelbajac (closed in 2016) for the SS12 collection in the form of a long sleeve dress with an all over print. In 2012, it is Comme des Garçons, with FW13, that reminds us of the subversive power that a simple pair of mouse ears can bring to the catwalk - Mickey Mouse, in his interpretative malleability, also allows himself to be modelled by the maximalist sophisms of Rei Kawakubo. It is Marc Jacobs, in his mega-impressive Pindaric flights, who conquers celebrities and magazines with a dark grey cropped jumper with Mickey Mouse that smacks of high fashion grunge (its red variant from the SS13 collection is even up for auction).

Mickey Mouse in contemporary fashion

Moschino

Mickey Mouse x Supreme

Gucci x Disney

Gucci x Disney

Maison Margiela

Gucci x Disney

After the presentation of the biographical film Walt before Disney in 2015, inspired by Timothy Susanin's book, and with the celebration of Mickey Mouse's 90th birthday in 2018, fashion has continued to reshape the contours of an intergenerational icon: collaborations with Supreme, Zara, Moschino [tv] H&M, Gap, Kith or Tommy Hilfiger's college jacket are just some of the examples of how those red shorts with two buttons and yellow over shoes have been taken and divided between ready-to-wear and fast fashion. But it was perhaps Alessandro Michele's work at Gucci that brought out the best in the Mickey Mouse character, taking his head and turning it into a bag on the catwalk of the SS19 show. Only a year later, to coincide with the Year of the Chinese Mouse, Gucci collaborated with Disney by combining the Florentine fashion house's monogram with Mickey Mouse's face. Even John Galliano, starting from the reflections explored by Maison Margiela Couture, goes as far as to enlist Mickey Mouse in the Co-Ed 2023 fashion show by printing his image on T-shirts in a minefield of fishnet leggings, ruby red Tabi stiletto heels, chiffon-covered flannel shirts and punk brooches. It is worth remembering that «it all started with a dream and a mouse», a mouse whose innocent appearance encapsulates an unexpectedly cynical and realistic message: «You might not realise it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth might be the best thing in the world for you,» Walt Disney said. And fashion realised this long ago.