Three’s A Trend: Dead Girls Walking

Perhaps all those vampire films and zombie shows (The Walking Dead, anyone?) are finally taking their sartorial toll, because things are getting downright ghoulish on the Fall ’13 runways. It all started in London when Giles Deacon sent out models with white hair and morbid makeup in his Pre-Raphaelite gowns. Kristen McMenamy (above, center), who bookended the show in fluid black and white frocks, was particularly spectral as she glided down the catwalk, and Deacon’s location—the seventeenth-century Stationers’ Hall, which is just down the road from Saint Paul’s Cathedral—seemed ripe for haunting.

Set in a nineteenth-century hôtel particulier, Damir Doma’s Fall show (above, left) also had an underworld air. The models who donned his minimal black, gray and moss looks had powdered faces and eerie gold-shadowed eyes. Not surprisingly, however, the most macabre of them all was Gareth Pugh (above, right). The designer presented his architectural, largely black and white collection in Paris’ nineteenth-century Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild last night. (For an extra-creepy kick, he boarded up the windows to make the grand space look like some kind of decadent haunted house.) Pugh’s models, who had deathly pale faces and blackened eyes, roamed the runway with a disheveled unease. Was it spooky? Definitely. But the undead never looked so good.