The enduring influence of Frankenstein on fashion
Mary Shelley's 200-year-old creation-gone-wrong story has been intriguing designers for decades. Here, Vogue examines how the doctor and his monster became fashion tropes.
Colin Clive and Boris Karloff in "Frankenstein"
Imagine it. June 1816. A villa in Italy. A season soon to be dubbed "the year without a summer" already well underway – the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the previous year playing havoc with the heavens. A ragtag set of writers and friends looking for ways to occupy themselves during endless storms. Intense nightly discussions of medicine, literature, poetry. One night, a challenge set by a member of the group, Lord Byron: the devising of ghost stories. A terrible nightmare suffered a few days later by the then 18-year-old Mary Shelley, there with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and their child. The bones of a book constructed from this nightmare. A book later to become one of the best known Gothic novels in the English language: a proto-science fiction epic depicting the destructive consequences of a doctor who plays at God and builds his very own being…
Focus in specifically on Frankenstein and a particularly intricate set of allusions emerge. This story of a monster built from assorted body parts has proved itself enduringly compelling. So much so that "Frankenstein" has become shorthand in the fashion world for something resembling several spliced garments – most recently found in House of Holland and Fengchen Wang's respective autumn/winter 2018 collections with their "Frankenstein jackets" formed of what looked like two separate halves stitched together.
More specifically though, two designers have recently credited Mary Shelley's creation as a presiding force. After his autumn/winter 2018 Gucci show – an extravaganza of clashing layers, sweeping skirts and the odd model with a replica head held under one arm – Alessandro Michele claimed "we are all Dr Frankensteins of our lives", placing the doctor's scientific follies alongside Donna Haraway's 1985 text A Cyborg Manifesto as a twinset of influences on his eclectic collection. Both intensely preoccupied by what makes us human, they're intriguing texts when it comes to thinking about how bodies are formed, interpreted and potentially remade – as well as, in the case of Gucci, clothed.