The bustier came first. Thierry Mugler showed it at the Spring 1992 ready-to-wear collection he called Les Cowboys, a Harley-Davidson chassis collapsed into something a body could wear: tank, headlamp, handlebar moustaches of chrome at the shoulder, leather and rubber where a bike would have steel. The FIT Fashion History timeline catalogues it under his haute couture-adjacent showpieces; the academic case study at City Tech makes the point that Mugler rode motorbikes himself, and the sculptural logic of the corset wasn't drawn from couture so much as from the silhouette of the thing he commuted on.

What turned it from a runway piece into a generation's reference image was the second life it got that summer. George Michael needed a video for Too Funky. Mugler agreed to costume it, then ended up directing it as well, which is a sentence I have to type slowly to believe. The cast list reads like a casting sheet smuggled out of a Paris atelier: Linda Evangelista, Tyra Banks, Nadja Auermann, Estelle Hallyday, Eva Herzigová, with Julie Newmar and Rossy de Palma in the actress slots. Emma Sjöberg got the bustier. She wore it down the catwalk inside the video, with Mugler himself visible at the side of the frame in a director's chair, calling shots.

The original plan was different. Michael had wanted the Big Five, Linda, Naomi, Christy, Cindy, Tatjana, but Mugler argued for newer faces and the lineup got rebuilt. Linda stayed. Everyone else turned over. This is the small fact I keep returning to, because it suggests the video was already being treated as a fashion-house production with casting authority sitting on the designer's side of the table, not the label's. Michael, by all accounts, was content to direct from the music side and let Mugler handle what the camera saw.

The afterlife is busier than the runway. Beyoncé wore a Mugler-rebuilt version of the bustier in promotional imagery around I Am... Sasha Fierce, and the Met's Costume Institute included the original in its 2008 Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy show. The garment has been read since as a campy prefiguration of cyborg couture, of the Cirque d'Hiver chrome bodysuit three years later, and of every subsequent attempt to put aerospace or automotive construction on a human torso.

What I want to mark is the cross-medium routing. A couturier showed a motorcycle as a bustier in March, costumed a pop video in May or June, directed it himself, and put the same garment on a runway inside the video, on a different model, in a different city. That round trip from atelier to MTV in under a season is the kind of thing the rest of the 90s spent trying to imitate, badly, with brand-deal pop videos that did none of the choreography Mugler did instinctively. The bustier is the artefact most people remember; the video is the route by which they remember it.

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