It is time for main character energy: corsets and crinolines flaunting tough leather on London runways.

At John Richmond, rocker chic met ethereal vibes in veiled chemises, Victorian tailcoats, and chokers, dabbed with neon pink and graveyard makeup. In the “Savage Heart” collection, models flirted with the paranormal through the underground crypt of Saint Martins-in-the-Fields Church.

Erdem’s Fall 2026-2027 Ready-to-Wear show, titled, “Imaginary Conversations,” resurrected muses from various eras of British history in an intimate layering of plaids and florals. The collection followed its Spring-Summer show, which portrayed the musings of a nineteenth-century French medium, Hélène Smith (famed for channeling the alleged spirit of Marie Antoinette), shaping the feminine figure in boned corsetry and panniers.

The drama of the British Isles is not unique in seducing the modern into the past, or rather, awakening the past into the present. Collections from Milan, New York, and Paris also internalized the era of the Dark Romantic on the runways, retelling a symbiosis of stories with modern perspectives.

Dark Romanticism on the Runway

In Milan, Blumarine’s Spring-Summer 2026 Ready-to-Wear collection narrated a brooding tale through draped hemlines adorned with metal crosses. Dracula inspired, designer David Koma transformed Blumarine’s embroidered butterfly motifs to dragonflies and spiders—emblems embellished in garments of Victorian mourning. The brand’s synthesis into a dark fantasy displayed contrasts between fragility and strength, masculine heaviness and feminine softness, and technical precision and fluidity, which are focal points of Gothic literature.

New York’s Rodarte Fall 2025 added shades of crimson and lavender to a grayscale palette, mirroring a moonlit reverie. Exposed décolletage and chokers played between Victorian innocence and lasciviousness.

In Paris, Ashi Studio Couture gave vampire lore: corsets stitched in hourglass form and a hand-painted “ghost effect” gown. Intricate lacing recalls a time when women would sew the hair of the deceased into their gowns, preserving life after death.

Desire whispered through the sound of poetry on the runway, saying, “When the door closes behind us, what exists inside? If you taste my everything, will you ever forget it? If you leave before dawn, what piece of me will you take?”(Ashi Studio Spring-Summer 2026). The speaker grapples with loss and uncertainty, evoking human emotion as a timeless haunting into the future.

These sensual details and macabre mark a break from the last few years’ clean girl aesthetic, quiet luxury, and neutral practicality that had emerged post-pandemic. Whereas the quiet, cotton pastel prints of “cottagecore” and its whimsical coquetry symbolized a return to conservatism, and may have been intended to stabilize values during an unprecedented period, Dark Romanticism pivots from safe ideology, and it is its subversive soul sister.

Bloody Origins

This story begins a few centuries ago, when respect for scientific rationale departed from the immeasurable, and human emotion became the absurd. With Britain leading a movement to preserve the natural world, artists who lived on the edges of society challenged the tolerance of colonialism, patriarchal power, and ecocide. Poets, such as Samuel Coleridge, argued against the justification of human trafficking and labor exploitation in emerging industrialization.

Romanticism of the late eighteenth century was a way for the public to claim its own autonomy. Political writer Edmund Burke established how sublime beauty, in contrast to empiricism, was not expected to be perfectly symmetrical, or even understood, and it was this uncertainty that led to the uncanny.

Unconventional elements of interest – atmospheres drenched in suspense, uncomfortable psychologies, and ponderings with the supernatural – had been dabbled by Shakespeare and in Milton’s Paradise Lost, but it was The Castle of Otranto that unveiled the underpinnings of Romanticism.

The British were eyewitnesses to the political instability in France that had culminated in hysteria, resulting in thirty thousand executions that had soaked medieval Parisian streets and villages, in addition to the destruction of monuments and desecration of houses of worship, where remains are still being excavated today. It became ‘in vogue’ to reject layers of luxury fabric and embellishments of the Ancien Régime, and embrace plain, ghastly, unstructured dresses with unkempt hair and necks wrapped with a red ribbon to honor the lives of those who had been decapitated by the guillotine.

While “heads will roll” fashion rose in solidarity with victims and prisoners of France, the Brits adapted the simple, empire-waist dresses, signifying how darkness was more than a fashion trend.

Bloodshed, horror, and crumbling infrastructure exposed centuries-long oppression. But while the transformation in “costume” gave birth to modern constructions, trauma remained. Unfinished business of lingering ghosts, ancestral curses, and provocative longing filled the pages of stories, giving rise to the Gothic genre. In the words of Dracula, “It is only when a man feels himself face to face with horrors that he can understand their true import” (Stoker, 1897).

Shadow Work

With a return to details from centuries past, what would the Romantics examine about fashion today? Shelley might say each piece is a Frankenstein of stitchery, with its sheer layering of the body and dramatic sculpting. Charlotte Brontë would advocate for the versatility of the corset, from its rigid intentions to its deconstruction.

Nevertheless, fashion history finds cultural parallels between the past and present that can explain the return to the Gothic. Whereas the Romantics expressed mourning for a life long gone in the pastoral, we, too, express nostalgia for simpler decades amid political instability.

In an era that has been largely driven by an investment in S.T.E.M. and A.I., we are now beginning to search for solace in the humanities. Unlike straightforward answers from ChatGPT, we are learning that progress is subjective, and human emotion cannot be measured without human expression.

The Gothic exists to challenge polarities, implying that Erdem’s leather and lace can coexist. Blumarine’s ruffled hemlines and translucent cutouts caution not to fear the female form, but to morph among its shapeshifting.

Perhaps the “ghost effect” on Ashi Studio’s hand-painted gown represents an era of self-discovery – to deconstruct the ego, and fall deeper into our shadow selves with poetic understanding.

Featured Image Credit: Erdem RTW S/S 2026 @nowfashion