Mirrors Are Invading Our Wardrobes—and Maybe Our Minds

“Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links.”

Contents

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion Mirror Disc Organza Midi Skirt David Koma

ashion is built to make you look. A sculpted wool sleeve, a shredded denim hem, a skirt that changes shape whenever you walk in the wind—style’s whole purpose is to set you apart through a series of visual choices that cause admiring stares, or at least some second glances with a grin. That’s why the Fall 2025 runways felt a little… uh… uneasy. There were still clothes that caused a spectacle, like Saint Laurent’s square-shouldered fuchsia warrior jackets meant to blind enemies in the boardroom, and Duran Lantik’s snakeskin hourglasses, slashed above the knee for maximum dance floor potential. But the rack of “look at me!” outfits nearly got outnumbered by a steady march of looks that said, instead, “Hey. Forget about me. Look at you.”

How’d they do it? By sewing shattered mirrors and reflective embellishments onto everything, forcing a literal self-reflection that’s shiny and pretty, and also, pretty unsettling.

It happened at Sandy Liang in New York, where models wore badges shaped like horse-show blue ribbons, but topped with big, round mirrors instead of first-place platitudes. When they flounced down the runway, you could see a shard of your own face reflected back from their lapels. It got more sinister at Jane Wade, the independent label that sewed rectangular strips of metal onto gray knits, then let them unravel. “Don’t look at yourself too closely,” the pieces seemed to say, “or things are gonna come apart.” Even Wes Gordon’s demur damsels at Carolina Herrera swapped last season’s ombre sequins for huge mirror paillettes that clacked a little when they moved. Versace merged a shattered mirror with a disco ball, creating a mosaic corset top that lets us check our mascara just by bending over our boobs. And at Sarah Burton’s compelling Givenchy debut, one dress clattered with salvaged mirrors from makeup compacts, which reflected the runway lights back to the front row like tiny bat signals. “It’s all you!” said the sheath dress. “Like, literally.”

Naturally, there’s a bit of an Alice Through the Looking Glass theme happening here. Fashion is a wonderland, even if it doesn’t have a John Mayer song like Jennifer Love Hewitt’s shoulder blades. And just like in Alice’s upside-down world, looking at your own reflection can lead to some personal chaos, albeit through a TikTok filter and not a magic portal for Victorian misfit girls. The wonky parallel was especially strong at Fendi, where models wore flouncy black velvet bows along with pencil skirts embroidered with tiny triangle mirrors, and front row guests like Hailee Steinfeld were offered tiny bottles of booze shaped like Alice’s “Drink Me” elixirs. The obsession extends into current retail, too: Bode, Ganni, and Staud all have current pieces for sale that are marked as “Alice Blue” for the opium-blue shade made famous by Disney’s 1951 movie. (In fact, “Alice Blue” predates The Devil Wears Prada’s Cerulean blue tantrum by nearly 50 years but boasts the same pigmented impact.)

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

$21.00 at amazon.com

The eerie “through the looking glass” universe was first coined by Lewis Carroll in 1871 but we’ve got a modern version — 2019’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion, by writer Jia Tolentino — coming in hot for fashion’s mirror trend. Tolentino’s sharpest gift is naming what we all know but can’t totally pinpoint. After she started taking endless selfies and altering them through digital filters, she named the malaise that comes from creating a modified digital version of ourselves, then getting a little sad it’s not our actual selves. “Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet,” she wrote, “the mirage of the better online self continued to glimmer.”

These split selves emerged at London Fashion Week, where Erdem Moralioglu debuted a top and skirt embroidered with thousands of tiny, mirrored slashes — up close, they looked like teeny velociraptor claws — that reflected the runway audience as a giant, foreboding clump of moving shadows. He sandwiched the mirror clothes with dresses covered in giant portraits by the artist Kaye Donachie, with traditional canvas swapped for gauzy fabric that made the painted faces ripple and warp. Julien Dossena used similar mirror shreds at Rabanne in Paris, but he bundled them in PVC trench coats, which further distorted the models’ reflections while shielding them from the outside world, turning the dresses’ tiny metallic pieces into literal trick mirrors. By wrapping them in plastic, Dossena made his reflective party clothes double as a warning: “Caution! Girls in the mirrors are more dangerous than they appear.”

The models weren’t the only ones forced into self-reflection. At shows like Tom Ford, Schiaparelli, Gucci, and Jil Sander, the ceiling, floor, and backdrops were made of mirrors, so if you weren’t staring at the clothes on the runway—or the clothes through your camera phone — you had to stare at (gulp) yourself. It also happened at Diotima, where giant smashed mirrors stood between the models and the audience. As I blanched at my too-pale skin and my too-twisted curls before designer Rachel Scott’s acclaimed show, I thought of Naomi Klein’s weirdo opus Doppelgänger: A Trip Into Mirror World, which really messed me up when I read it in 2023. In the book, Klein reflects on her own “evil twin”—the feminist thinker turned conservative pundit Naomi Wolf, whom Klein was frequently mistaken for online—along with the twisted history of shadow selves in myths like Narcissus and Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec god whose “smoking mirror” reflected the true souls of his human kingdom.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Diotima™ (@diotima.world)

While writing the book, Klein realized that every time we post selfies online, we make our own evil twins appear—“doubles of our ‘real’ selves,” she writes—but with slightly smoother foreheads, marginally whiter teeth, subtly brighter apartments, the chaos of real life cropped out of frame and replaced by captions that vacuum-pack our clashing emotions into tidy emojis. Klein notes this fissure between our IRL and URL selves is making us disconnect from reality, paving the way for distrust and misinformation to reign. That disconnect is also binding us to a “person” we can never be, not even if we wear pieces that make us feel dazzling, like Jimmy Choo’s mirrored stilettos or Stella McCartney’s mirror tank or Prada’s mirror skirt or all of them at once. (Fair warning, though: Do that, and you’re gonna get pounced by cats like you’re the broken mirror on the Flow ship.)

Mirror Disc Organza Midi Skirt

$3850.00 at bergdorfgoodman.com

Even clothes and accessories themselves are being forced to confront their doppelgangers in the form of “reissues,” which are popular bags and shoes from past collections that get resurrected and remade for modern audiences. We saw it at Chloe with the much-swiped return of the Paddington bag, the chunky leather swinger first seen on Y2K goddesses like Daria Werbowy and Gemma Ward. Dior reissued its Galliano-era “J’Adore Dior” tee (as seen on Carrie Bradshaw circa 2001) and Alexander McQueen’s skull scarves, the freak flag for all indie sleaze kids? Those are back, too, mirroring the hopes and dreams (and plundered bank accounts) of our former, younger selves.

sandy liang ready to wear fall winter 2025 — Sandy Liang Fall 2025 Courtesy of Launchmetrics.com/spotlight

And sure, all this talk of doppelgangers can loop back to Severance, the chokehold of a television show that posits our work selves and our home selves are basically just evil twins. Besides being gruesome and great, Severance is a masterclass in corporate style. Costume designer Sarah Edwards uses dagger-precise pencil skirts and chest-thump blazers to divide the actress Britt Lower into two separate people: Hellie, the fiery mid-level “innie” who shows up at work with a crush on her supervisor, and Helena, the C-suite “outie” whose iron fist on her family’s company might eventually strangle them all. There were shades of the show on the runway, especially at Prada, where pencil skirts reassured watchers that though the collection was more challenging, the beloved essentials were still business as usual. And in a nod to the mirror selves we maintain from 9 to 5 (or 6, or 8…), many of the office-worthy pencil skirts from Alainpaul, Dior, Ferragamo, and Tory Burch were reflective.

Can any of these fashion mirrors help us out? Or are designers convinced we’re trapped, as Tolentino says, “walking toward the idealized mirage of [our] own self image?” That depends entirely on what we decide to do with these clothes. If we pull on the Givenchy mirror dress only to worry that we don’t look amazing in its tiny, fractured reflections, then our evil twins win. We get in our heads; we decide we’re not good enough; we forget we’re wearing a cool dress to do cool things; game over. But if instead we wear these tiny mirrors to confront our own reflections and to agree that, whether we like what we see or not, we’re gonna walk out the door and do our best with the day we’re given, then we’ve got a chance. The catch, of course, is that this type of self-reflection should happen with or without encouragement from David Koma’s Mirror Sequin Halter Dress. Though if you’d like to wear it as a reminder to look inwards, at least it’s currently 70% off.