Do they only play Charli XCX through the hallways of Central Saint Martins? Because this season, it seemed many of the ex-students of the famed London fashion school were obsessed with the concept of sexy people being hit by cars. This was most evident at Mowalola, where the disturbed, deeply provocative SS24 collection was inspired by one of the mid-90s most controversial movies. “I watched this really fucked up movie, Crash, and that just set the tone for how wild I could go because the movie is about fetishising car crashes,” Mowalola told i-D after the show. The crack-revealing bumsters, belt-size mini skirts and über-tight baby tees over seemingly bashed-up bodies, held together by orthopaedic braces, all spoke to the kinky car crash lovers of the David Cronenberg classic. But the general shock factor of the movie (upon its release, the film was booed at Cannes and newspaper campaigns and local councils pushed for it to be banned) was filtered into more garments: like a miniskirt emblazoned with the Saudi Arabian flag containing sacred texts (which she’s since apologised for) and a polo shirt that read “4 skinny people”.
While Cronenberg’s Crash was not named a direct inspiration for other collections, the symphorophilia vibes continued over at fellow CSM graduates Masha Popova and KNWLS. In an ode to the thrill of monster trucking, the former covered her distressed, aggressively-treated denims in mud splatters and tyre tracks like the model had just crawled out from under the big wheels. Other looks in the collection featured rusted prints that suggested up close and personal encounters à la Titane. At KNWLS, Charlotte Knowles and Alex Arsenault delivered “Petrol”, a collection that gave their signature sexy leather and mesh pieces a moto-makeover with grease-slicked jackets, knee high biker boots, printed mesh tees that nodded to a Harley Davidson driver’s wardrobe and oiled up dresses featuring hip cut outs – the latter worn by it girl du jour Mia Khalifa.
Crash was not the only Cronenberg movie that felt prescient this season. Pam Hogg’s show, entitled Apocalypse, opened with a medley of models wearing loosely-tied retro-futuristic white latex nurses smocks over their naked bodies. On the front of the scrubs were blood-red medical cross symbols, while dresses and bodysuits made in the same style were eerily pinned to the skin itself. It all had a distinctly Crimes Of The Future feel. In Cronenberg’s most recent movie, we visit a dystopian future where sexual pleasure is derived from surgical procedures and body modification. On Pam’s runway, images of medieval orthopaedic gloves appeared on screen behind the models alongside words like “redemption”, “atonement” and “judgement day”.
Other horror movies made their way onto the London Fashion Week runway too. Both 16Arlington and Matty Bovan were lightly inspired by watching surrealist Lynchian psycho thrillers. 16Arlington channeled the 1997 noir Lost Highway (yes, more vroom vroom vibes), while the latter designer’s colourful cacophony of garms built over CK undergarments looked to David Lynch and Stephen King’s respective canons to create a dark dream world.
Then there were all the designers dressing the wanderers of an apocalyptic wasteland. Ashley Williams imagined a cult of Gen Z teen girls wearing garments made from the overflow of post-consumption tat to be found in an otherwise barren wilderness (very Yellowjackets). Lueder’s SS24 lookbook took utilitarian pieces fit for survival, such as rubber shoes with separated toes and sporty double zip jackets, and styled them with a punk edge, and shot them against a backdrop of abandoned, upturned cars filling the air with carbon monoxide. The resulting images feel lifted from a disaster movie like The Day After Tomorrow or Cloverfield.
Conner Ives, too, was inspired by the end times. The seeds of his collection came from TikTok-documented scenes of NYC’s fashion girls queuing for sample sales in the orange smog that engulfed The Big Apple earlier this year. But the opening look from the collection paid homage to a very different type of horror, with burgeoning supermodel Alex Consani wearing a black baby tee and maxi skirt adorned by swooping swans along with ballet flats and a hair-scraping headband in a nod to the bone-cracking thriller Black Swan.
So why are all the London designer’s dressing us for horror movies? Perhaps it’s noteworthy that many of the film references – from car crash kinks to the post-apocalyptic – are not so much about stopping a very prescient and real danger, but accepting our fate; living within a dystopia.
Of course, this is a temporary panic. The SS24 collections don’t overarchingly play into a nonchalance or an acceptance of this fate. The characters showcased on the runway may be living in the terrifying aftermath of the catastrophe but, in the case of all the designers mentioned, they’re still finding ways to push forward. There is hope. Perhaps that comes in the form of the goddesses that closed Pam Hogg’s show, dressed in angelic garb; perhaps it comes in the form of the cannibalistic cult of terrifying teen girlies at Ashley Williams. They are, after all, the ones ready to fight.
