After the storm, the calm, and after the urban bustle, the bucolic retreat. Or so it has been for Mugler’s Casey Cadwallader, who has lately been spending time at his country home outside Paris, flexing those green fingers of his while digging the earth, cultivating the flowers, and tending his plants. Just don’t think that he’s giving himself and Mugler over to some idea of full-blown romance rooted in French jardins. Nope, not at all. This season everything was as darkly dramatic as ever. As Cadwallader took me through his moodboard a day or so before his show, he indicated a series of images showing cross sections of flowers that were almost anatomical, where the inner complexity of the blooms was laid bare. They looked rather disturbing in a sci-fi way—menacing, even. “Menacing,” he said laughing, “that’s what we go for here.” When he gardens, he said he’s been using an app called Picture This to distinguish between plant and weed, to determine what he should nurture and what he should discard.
I mean, you could see this analogy coming a mile off, but a designer working on a collection isn’t so very different. For spring 2025, that flora theme, the one he tended, was evident in his silhouette, which he worked and worked and worked. What this theme gave him was the opportunity yet again to push the atelier as to what it could magic up. There were the likes of a deftly constructed black jacket from its pinched (his word) waist secured by a single pearl button before blooming upward to wide shoulders like an opening flower, while hipward—the hips have been an ongoing obsession for designers this season—everything got more geometric, with curved panels jutting outward from the body. This and variations of it came with very abbreviated skirts or (perhaps more effectively, IMO) some impeccably tailored wide pants. Elsewhere, Cadwallader drew on those cross-sectional images, with a short, sculpted black dress that dramatically exploded with a turquoise flower made from layers and layers of finely wrought organza.
Yet as with all gardening projects, Cadwallader was also considering the bigger picture; nothing was seen in isolation. He was also drawn, he said, to reflecting the entirety of the Muglerverse he has created, giving women (and men—there were four looks for them here) a full sweep of how he sees the house dressing them. For Cadwallader, it was a pivot from the way he has done things in the past, and given it’s the house’s 50th anniversary, it was timely. So, despite the fantasias, there was also khaki cotton drill suiting that lightly drew on Monsieur Mugler’s love of epic architecture, and denim in the form of blouson gilets and jeans with attenuated stemlike legs. “I wanted to do full looks—I can get really obsessed with the totality of them—and that’s something I wanted to push this season,” Cadwallader said. “And I wanted to be very clothing first. Mugler is quite known for its characters and personalities, and that’s not going away. The ethos of the brand and that confidence and that sensuality has to be there, but I wanted to try to put it in a very different presentation.”
Cadwallader has of late shown his collections as pop cultural extravaganzas that have managed to combust the internet, but this season he went for a somewhat quieter and more intimate idea, showing out of the storied performance space Le Trianon in Pigalle. (Though he still had some big names show their support: Anitta, Laverne Cox, and Cardi B among them.) “With Mugler it’s exciting to have changes, and it’s not that you need to shock, but just to surprise them to feel a freshness in what’s happening,” he said. “And so last season was super theatrical, with drones flying around and curtains dropping away and all the darkness. But now it’s lighter; I was like, ‘I don’t want to obsess about the curve of that hip and then not see it this time!’”
This approach isn’t a first for the house. In the past I went to see shows from founder Thierry Mugler that made Las Vegas look like dinner theater, but equally—and just as memorably—I went to a showing of one collection at Mugler’s atelier where the designer himself talked us through some exemplary versions of his black tailoring, all versions looking as if they had been cut with a scalpel. The memory of that was ignited when looking at Cadwallader’s suiting, which, traced with a matrix of patent-leather strips, recalled Monsieur Mugler’s superhero moments back when the likes of Valkyrie-esque model Lynn Koestler strode the earth.
Like all designers incumbent at historic houses that don’t bear their names, Cadwallader is switching between a past he didn’t create and a future he’s readily engaged in imagining. It’s more, he intimated, an act of recontextualizing so that what went before is there but in the least obvious of ways—like a spangled dress once worn by Naomi Campbell that he turned into a suit dotted with gleaming rivets, or one of the men’s jackets that started life as one worn by Diana Ross, who rocked it on the Mugler runway in 1991. Cadwallader resisted, even with the big anniversary, giving in to nostalgia. “I like the idea of going deep into an idea that is from the archive,” he said, “but not using a single thing literally in the end.”
