Editor’s note: Vogue Runway is celebrating the most wonderful time of the year by adding six magical—and newly digitized—1990s haute couture shows to our archive. Thierry Mugler’s spring 1998 collection was originally presented on January 17, 1998, in Paris .
Manfred Thierry Mugler came out of retirement to design Kim Kardashian’s 2019 wet-look Met Gala dress, a corseted silicon creation dripping with drops of “water.” “He had this vision of me as a California girl, getting out of the ocean, in L.A. or Malibu, and onto the red carpet,” she told Vogue at the time.
The wet look was one theme in Mugler’s spring 1998 couture collection. Presented salon-style, the show was a mix of couture and ready-to-wear looks in which the designer explored a broad range of ideas and materials, including denim, quills, feathers, and metal.
Though he’s best known for his dominatrix–meets–space vixen looks, there was a surprising element of classicism to this collection, which was focused on draping and the way materials flow over the body, almost like a drop of water slides down the side of a glass.
Even when dressed, the true subject of ancient sculptures is the revealing of the body; Mugler added some burlesque-type spice to this idea, with cutouts that daringly bared the anatomy, be that by exposing almost all of the breast or the entirety of the buttocks (see looks 51 and 61). The boldest piece in the collection was a number where the chiffon that wafted over the model’s body was suspended from her nipple rings.
The finale look, worn by the statuesque Nadja Auermann, was covered entirely in crystals, in an apparent reference to Mugler’s best-selling fragrance, Angel, a scent that still has wings decades later.
