Mugler

Mugler was founded in 1973 by Thierry Mugler, a French designer who had previously worked as a window dresser at La Gauloise and as a designer at Café de Paris. His thesis was unambiguous from the first collection: extreme silhouettes, body-conscious tailoring, science-fiction theatricality, and a glamour that owed as much to 1940s Hollywood as to 1980s body builders. The 1992 retrospective show at the Cirque d'Hiver and the 1995 couture show with Diana Ross-style finale defined the maximalist register the brand would occupy for two decades. Mugler retired from the house in 2002 and the brand drifted creatively through the 2000s. Casey Cadwallader became creative director in 2017 and engineered one of luxury's quietest revivals: stretch nylon catsuits, the cult Wendy Williams reference, the latex 'Body Glove' silhouette, and a long string of Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian, Megan Thee Stallion, and Hunter Schafer styling moments. The brand's resurgence has been driven almost entirely by viral red-carpet visibility. Mugler is wholly owned by L'Oréal subsidiary L'Oréal Luxe and is best known commercially for the Angel fragrance — one of the best-selling perfumes of all time, in continuous production since 1992. Thierry Mugler himself died in January 2022. Few designers have left a vocabulary so unmistakable that 22 years after retiring, his stage-design references continued to define what 'high-femme provocation' could mean in luxury fashion.