The Feminist Meaning Behind Reason Zendaya's Archive Mugler 'Dune' Look
Is it a woman in armour shielded or trapped? If you asked Brigitte Helm, the 19-year-old star of Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis who plays a woman, a robot, and a robot disguised as a woman (complete with jerking limbs and droopy eyelids), she might have confirmed the latter. In her robotic costume designed by Walter Schulze-Mittendorff, she sustained cuts and bruises from its inflexible fit and sharp edges – encased for nine days while they shot one especially demanding scene in the depths of a Berlin winter.
French fashion designer Thierry Mugler’s famed ‘Maschinenmensch’ suit, worn to glorious effect last night by Zendaya at the London premiere of Dune: Part Two, was directly inspired by Lang’s film and its accompanying novel by Lang’s wife (who also wrote the film’s script) Thea von Harbou. In both, the figure of the robot woman – among the first fictional feminised automatons – looms large as an unsettling symbol of sexual obsession and potential destruction, embodying contemporary anxieties about the treatment of humans as machines in an era of industrial mass production.
Nothing about Metropolis is subtle. Set in the year 2026 it imagines a soaring, angular urban dystopia: the art deco skyscrapers where the idle rich flounce around in their finery, enjoying the pleasures of the ‘Eternal Gardens’, sustained by legions of labourers who work beneath them in the bowels of the city, sustaining the ‘Heart Machine’ power generator. The film follows a series of clashes, machinations and revelations between the rulers and labourers, with a spanner thrown in the works by the if-not-mad-then-certainly-obsessive scientist Rotwang – a futuristic Frankenstein-style creator of the famed robot.
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This robot is (bear with me) first created in homage to the dead love of Rotwang’s life and then transformed via some cutting-edge special effects into the likeness of a captured dissenter called Maria who has been fomenting rebellion among the working class. Although Rotwang is ordered to enact this transformation by his superiors so that her reputation might be destroyed by this replicant, the scientist wants something more: wholesale destruction of the Metropolis, with this robot Maria (known as Futura in the book) as his secret weapon.
It’s unsurprising that Mugler was attracted to Metropolis, given his own interest in transforming women into hybrid creatures that blurred the lines between human, animal, and machine. A gown could metamorphose a model into an insect, while a metal bustier rendered her a motorcycle. The suit worn by Zendaya is one of his most iconic works, showcased during his extravagant hour-long 20th anniversary couture show in 1995. Taking six months to make in collaboration with artist Jean-Jacques Urcun, it was revealed on the catwalk in suggestive striptease fashion: a model appearing in a large black hat and voluminous purple satin coat, layer upon layer of fabric removed to reveal the gleaming metal and plastic beneath.
What’s especially clever about Mugler’s creation is the way in which it makes clear the fusion between human and machine, all those shiny surfaces contrasting with the flesh beneath the Perspex. Stiffly encasing the body, the suit is nonetheless highly erotic: its cut-outs revealing the wearer’s nipples and buttocks in the ultimate look-but-don’t-touch flourish. Like his entire oeuvre of work, it toys – at times naughtily, at times uncomfortably – with the logical extremes of turning a woman into a gleaming object. Was such a project dehumanising? Or did his space-age glamazons and armoured fembots point up the constructed artificiality of womanhood, allowing, them, as he put it in a conversation with the art historian Linda Nochlin, to play 'The game of femininity' on their own terms?
Where Mugler trods, others have since followed. Metropolis has now become one of those films regularly cited in fashion show notes – influencing collections by brands from Givenchy to Tom Ford. There is a certain irony to this, given that high fashion, by its nature, tends to side with and cater to the ruling classes rather than the labourers on which it also depends. Then again, maybe this is the perfect film in that context given that its draw lies primarily in its stunning visuals, which all too easily distract from its obvious discomfort with revolutionary politics. Regardless, it has become part of the cultural wellspring of sci-fi movies such as Blade Runner, Star Wars and The Fifth Element (all of which in turn owe some debt to Metropolis).
Often, such references result in a kind of anxious glamour, a self-referential form of design that asks what design is for. What story is it telling? How bleak is its vision of what lies ahead? Are these clothes made as much for protection as expression? When Mugler debuted his suit, the world was on the cusp of a new technological era in the form of the internet, current concerns about AI – the next step in human-machine relations – hovering far, far away on the horizon.
Now as we near 2026 ourselves, it’s apt for Zendaya, styled by the ever-clever Law Roach, to nod to this incredible piece of fashion history, especially while promoting her own project that envisages another kind of feudal future where the same old battles about resources and power play out. Just as Metropolis will no doubt keep being returned to and reinterpreted, Mugler’s work is also malleable enough to find new resonances – and generate a cannily memorable red carpet moment too.
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