Thierry Mugler took the twentieth anniversary of his label to the Cirque d'Hiver on 26 March 1995 and staged it as a haute couture show that ran roughly an hour and contained around three hundred looks. The cast list reads now like an attempt to itemise a lost decade. Claudia, Linda, Kate, Karen, Naomi. Tippi Hedren, Patty Hearst, Veruschka. A brace of porn stars. Yorkshire terriers in numbers nobody has been able to satisfactorily explain. James Brown performed. The Botticelli-cribbing Venus gown that Cardi B later wore to the 2019 Grammys was unveiled at the same show. Even with all of that, the moment people remember is the second Nadja Auermann shed a floor-length purple coat and a sheer black cover-up to reveal a chrome and perspex bodysuit underneath.

The bodysuit, since catalogued by the V&A and Wikipedia under the name robot couture, was made in collaboration with three craftsmen rather than one. The corsetier Mr. Pearl built the inside, the artist Jean-Jacques Urcun shaped the surface, and Jean-Pierre Delcros, an aircraft bodywork specialist, did the hard panels. The visual references the house has acknowledged are Hajime Sorayama's airbrushed gynoids and Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis. What you actually saw on the runway was a woman in articulated metal with the mechanical detail of a fighter fairing and the joinery of a corset. The suit was structural in a way couture rarely is, because the construction logic was not from dressmaking at all. It came in via an industry that makes objects intended to fly without coming apart.

This is the part that justifies the bother of writing about it again. Couture has an expanded toolkit for soft goods. It has nobody on staff who knows how to anodise a panel or how to set a rivet that won't shear when the wearer breathes. Mugler went outside the trade and came back with a garment whose seams were not fabric seams. The collaboration model is the interesting fact, not the spectacle. After this show, the idea that a couture house could pull in an aerospace machinist or a bike-frame welder for a single garment stopped being fanciful. McQueen took the lesson into the moulded leather and resin work of the late 90s. Nicolas Ghesquière repurposed it at Balenciaga.

The other thing the show settled was who was going to photograph the suit. Helmut Newton ran an editorial in the November 1995 issue of American Vogue built around the gynoids, and that shoot is the one most people picture when they picture the suit, not the runway pass. Newton was on staff at French Vogue through the previous decade and had been working with Mugler in one configuration or another since 1976. The collection and the editorial belong to the same project. They were planned to sit beside each other on the page.

What the show did not do is end an era, although it gets written that way. The supermodel runway as a cultural form had another year of full pomp before it started to thin out, and Mugler himself produced couture for several more seasons before the line wound down at the start of the next decade. The accurate thing to say is narrower. On one March evening in 1995, the people who later got cast as the supporting characters of the decade were all at the Cirque d'Hiver at the same time, and the garment that turned up halfway through the show used a construction logic that no other couture house had on its floor. Whatever the gown count, that is the part the medium remembered.

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