In perhaps the most fashionable scheduling conflict ever, Björk couldn’t attend the latest Mugler show, one that she inspired, no less. Alas, she was in Bielsko-Biała, Poland, for the opening weekend of her touring exhibition Echolalia, performing a special DJ set that closed the Wędrujący Festiwal. So the Icelandic artist did the most Björk thing possible: she wore a look from the collection the same day it debuted in Paris. Who needs front-row pomp when you have a Polish market full of ravers?
For this latest rendezvous, styled by longtime collaborator Edda Guðmundsdóttir, Björk became Mugler’s satellite record-spinning model in a purple butterfly-print second-skin top and black leather corseted high-waisted skirt. Above it hovered a magnificent bit of house history: a fringed feather headpiece from Manfred Thierry Mugler’s spring 1997 haute couture collection, Les Insectes. The result collapsed nearly 30 years of Mugler into one silhouette: part woman, part extraterrestrial.
“I am so honoured to be wearing clothes from the mythological Mugler,” Björk tells Vogue, recalling seeing the house’s work up close at an exhibition with her makeup artist Hungry and marveling at its “miraculous craft, textiles and patterns: biological sci-fi galore!”
“The collection began with primal instinct, this idea that everything ultimately returns to nature,” Mugler designer Miguel Castro Freitas told Vogue backstage at the show. “There is an inherent tension within us all, a desire for pleasure that exists beyond reason or restraint.”
On the runway, organic Art Nouveau lines imparted wicked curves onto suiting, sculpted Mikado silk nodded to ’60s futurism, and feathers masqueraded as cheetah spots beneath organza. Synthetic hair cascaded down a dress; décolletages resembled insect anatomy; translucent flowers made from plastic bottles sprouted from crocodile-embossed tailoring. Suddenly Björk’s omnipresence made perfect sense. Titled Naturalia X, this collection is the third and final installment of Castro Freitas’s A Trilogy of Glorified Clichés, proposing nature as less wholesome or pastoral, more saucy, psychedelic, and occasionally menacing.
“Her raw emotion, radical freedom and untamed spirit have always been a source of inspiration,” Castro Freitas added. He sees a kinship between Björk and Mugler’s founder in their shared “refusal to conform to conventional ideas of beauty or glamour.” Translation: both are one of one.
While she may have been DJing many miles away, the singer was certainly at the Mugler show in spirit. Thirty-two screens surrounded the runway with Casper Sejersen’s remixed imagery from her songs “Possibly Maybe” and “Venus as a Boy.” Minutes before the show began, Italian composer Teho Teardo told Vogue how Björk had entered his score.
