Long Live the New Flesh: 6 Times David Cronenberg Inspired Runway Designers

J. Hoberman, former senior film critic for The Village Voice, once called David Cronenberg “the most audacious and challenging narrative director in the English-speaking world.” It is fitting. Over a fifty-five-year career, Cronenberg has created visceral sci-fi horror classics, tense psychological thrillers, haunting gangster dramas, and beautiful arthouse gems, without ever losing his obsession with the ways love, death, and technology intertwine.

Wildly polarizing among critics and audiences alike, Cronenberg, now in his eighties, remains a regular at Cannes, where he presented The Shrouds (2024), starring Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger. The film has since premiered in Canada, France, the U.S., and the U.K., marking the second chapter in a quiet Cronenberg renaissance, one even acknowledged by Charli XCX, which began with Crimes of the Future (2022).

From Dead Ringers to Crash and The Fly, Cronenberg’s visions of bodily mutation, infectious transformation, and biomechanical paraphilia have seeped their way into fashion’s most provocative collections. Here are six times the master of the “new flesh” reappeared on the runway.

PUPPETS AND PUPPETS FW23

For her sculptural project turned fashion line, Puppets and Puppets, creative director Carly Mark drew direct inspiration from Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988). Tailored wool suits, sequined dresses, snakeskin, and faux fur were modeled among food sculptures by artist Quori Theodor. The blood red garments echoed the surgical robes worn by the film’s identical twin gynecologists, both played by Jeremy Irons, whose mirrored identities spiral into psychosexual breakdown.

Surgical themes have long run through Cronenberg’s oeuvre, most recently in Crimes of the Future. Mark’s collection featured dresses printed with The Operation, an 18th-century painting by Gaspare Traversi depicting a man mid operation, screaming in agony. “It’s a mental breakdown movie about a set of twin doctors,” Mark said of Dead Ringers. “I do feel like we’re still working through the pandemic and how that psychologically affected us.” The result is a powerful push and pull, a tension between internal disorder and the desire to dress up, go out, and feel good again.

MOWALOLA SS24

What Central Saint Martins alumna Mowalola Ogunlesi staged at London Fashion Week SS24 was nothing short of a car crash, in the best sense. Cronenberg’s controversial Crash, which won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes despite the protests of jury president Francis Ford Coppola, saturated the show. The collection featured racing circuit regalia, low slung leather miniskirts reminiscent of McQueen’s “bumsters,” elastic harnesses, bras belted along the back, and orthopedic chic open toe boots evoking Rosanna Arquette’s character and her leg brace.

Some fans might also think of Cronenberg’s earlier film Fast Company (1979), a quieter meditation on speed and machinery. If Crash is the high impact, erotically charged wreck, Fast Company is its less chaotic but duller older sibling.

PAM HOGG SS24

Pam Hogg’s SS24 collection, titled Apocalypse, was a latex drenched exploration of the tension between religion and science. Models paraded in red, white, and black nurse uniforms marked by medical crosses that doubled as crucifixes. The visuals showed medieval orthopedic gloves with words like “Redemption,” “Judgment Day,” and “Atonement.” While framed as a tribute to the late Sinéad O’Connor, it is hard not to see echoes of Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg’s exploration of surgical ritual as performance art and sex.

Like the body art duo portrayed by Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux in the film, Hogg’s models looked less like caretakers and more like fetish clad surgeons about to engage in sacred mutilation. Medicine and martyrdom never looked so seductive.

COMME DES GARÇONS SS97

Rei Kawakubo’s SS97 collection, often referred to as the “lumps and bumps” show, culminated in a collaboration with legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham. “I realised that the clothes could be the body and the body could be the clothes,” Kawakubo later explained. “This was an idea for possible new clothes. I then started to design the body.”

This ethos mirrors David Cronenberg’s concept of the “new flesh,” coined in Videodrome (1983), which explores how technology and the psyche transform the body into something hybrid, warped, and posthuman. Kawakubo’s designs, bulging with tumor like protrusions, were not constrained by the body, they distorted and reimagined it. The result was a stunning rejection of beauty standards in favor of visceral, sculptural surrealism.

THIERRY MUGLER SS97

The late Manfred Thierry Mugler was a maestro of metamorphosis. For SS97, before unveiling his masterpiece Les Chimères, he presented a collection inspired by Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the documentary Microcosmos, and, most strikingly, Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986).

Eighty insectoid looks filled the runway of the Hôtel Ritz in Paris, antennae, exoskeletons, arthropod eyes, butterfly wings, and cocoons. Corsets, capes, and oversized blackout sunglasses transformed models into glamorous hybrids. Mugler’s vision leaned more toward the sublime than the grotesque, but Cronenberg’s influence was unmistakable, especially in the “tire” suit, a collision of rubber, leather, and erotic absurdity straight out of Crash.

SAINT LAURENT SS23

Around the time Anthony Vaccarello launched Saint Laurent’s film production division, the house invited several auteurs to star in its SS23 campaign, including Jim Jarmusch, Pedro Almodóvar, Abel Ferrara, and Cronenberg himself. Once seen as the embodiment of minimalist anonymity, Cronenberg suddenly emerged as a cult style icon, his 2022 Cannes appearance, complete with futuristic cycling sunglasses, sparked online buzz.

Vaccarello clearly took cues from Prada’s FW22 Menswear show, which featured cult film stars Kyle MacLachlan and The Fly’s Jeff Goldblum, both fashion forward “zaddies.” Since then, the Canadian director has appeared on YSL’s podcast, sat front row at shows, and even directed The Shrouds under Saint Laurent’s film wing.
Cronenberg once said, “As a director, I am obsessed with the actors’ bodies […] because they are my material for making my films.” The same could be said for fashion designers, who sculpt identity through the body just as Cronenberg does through film.

From haute couture to latex fetishism, from anatomical surrealism to surgical performance art, Cronenberg’s vision of the “new flesh” lives on, not just on screen, but stitched into fashion’s very fabric, mutating with every season.