This Spring/Summer 2026 season, Mugler doesn’t simply present a collection it summons a mythology.
Titled Stardust Aphrodite, the collection marks the incendiary first chapter of the Trilogy of Glorified Clichés, a conceptual arc that reclaims, distorts, and elevates the most overcharged symbols of desire. Under the direction of Miguel Castro Freitas, Mugler enters a new cosmology where glamour is neither nostalgic nor ironic, but dangerous again.
At its core, Stardust Aphrodite is an exploration of seduction as power, ancient, cinematic, and unapologetically theatrical. Freitas draws from the dual lineage of goddesses and screen sirens, collapsing myth and movie magic into a single, charged silhouette. These are not passive muses, but commanding figures: women carved from light, shadow, and intention.
The collection sculpts the body with Mugler’s signature architectural precision, yet there is a new fluidity at play. Curves appear magnified, stretched, and reframed, as if the body itself has been mythologized. Hard structures melt into second-skin drapery; celestial sheen clashes with noir sensuality. It’s a study in contrasts divinity versus desire, control versus abandon executed with fearless clarity.
Freitas’s vision of glamour is not decorative. It is confrontational. This is glamour that stares back, that dares the viewer to look longer, closer. References to classic clichés, femme fatales, silver-screen goddesses, divine femininity are not softened or sanitized. Instead, they are glorified, pushed to excess, and transformed into something new and electrifying.
There is a cinematic quality throughout the collection, as if each look belongs to an unrealized film: the kind that exists somewhere between dream and obsession. Stardust is not metaphorical here it clings to the garments, the bodies, the air. Aphrodite is not born from the sea, but from light, heat, and spectacle.
With Stardust Aphrodite, Mugler reawakens glamour as a disruptive force bold, seductive, and uncontainable. This is not a revival, nor a reinvention, but a continuation of Mugler’s eternal promise: fashion as myth-making, desire as design, and the body as a site of power.
Magnificently Mugler, and only the beginning.
Images Courtesy of Mugler.
