05 Aug The most influential fashion designer in history was probably not a fashion designer at all.
It may sound like a provocative statement, but only up to a point. Ask fashion designers themselves—the real ones, the people who wrestle with images season after season—and many of them will eventually arrive at the same conclusion. Sooner or later, somewhere on a mood board or in a forgotten reference lying on a studio table, David Bowie always appears.
It is fascinating that this happens above all in fashion. Perhaps because fashion was the first field to truly understand what Bowie was doing. Or rather, to understand that he wasn’t simply getting dressed. He was creating a language.
For a long time, fashion maintained a fairly rigid relationship with clothing. Elegance, belonging, status—even transgression—all existed within recognisable codes. Bowie disrupted that system. He transformed image into an ongoing narrative. He created characters. Style ceased to be static and became a process of constant transformation.
It is probably there that much of contemporary fashion begins.
The idea that a collection can function as an alter ego. That a brand can become a parallel identity. That clothing is not only a way of expressing who we are, but also who we might become—or choose to pretend to be.
Today, this feels entirely natural. Every season is expected to build its own world, tell its own story, project its own emotional identity. But in the 1970s, this way of thinking was far from obvious. Bowie made it visible, accessible, almost inevitable.
Fashion immediately recognised the potential of that vision because Bowie never separated the body from performance. Silhouette, make-up, posture, hair colour, theatricality, photography, movement—everything belonged to the same visual system.
His collaborations with Kansai Yamamoto remain pivotal for precisely this reason: performances expressed through clothing. Fashion stopped decorating the body and began transforming it.
Perhaps this is why Bowie became so essential to designers. Not simply because of the aesthetics—the jumpsuits, the glam, the make-up—but because he introduced a new way of thinking. The idea that fashion could construct temporary identities. Characters. Almost heteronyms.
It recalls Fernando Pessoa and his concept of becoming someone other than oneself. Or Fellini’s characters, forever suspended between autobiography and invention. Bowie brought that sensibility into popular culture, and fashion immediately absorbed its creative potential.
He also fundamentally reshaped the conversation around gender. At a time when menswear remained remarkably rigid, Bowie blurred the boundaries between masculine and feminine. What is most striking is how quickly fashion recognised the visual power of that ambiguity as an entirely new aesthetic possibility.
Much of today’s visual language—from genderless fashion and rock-infused tailoring to the contemporary obsession with fashion identity—can be traced back, at least in part, to that moment.
This is why Bowie continues to reappear throughout contemporary fashion. Not because designers simply quote him, but because he introduced a new way of thinking. He taught fashion something that now seems self-evident: image has the power to create an entire universe.
Fashion rarely predicts the future. Its far rarer gift is recognising it when it arrives from somewhere else.
The Ballets Russes
