Fashion’s Love of Witches
Photo via Pinterest
Witches are not what they used to be. Evolved from the trope of the evil, ugly hag, witches are now something cool, chic, even cute. From Sabrina the Teenage Witch to American Horror Story, and most recently Wednesday, witches in the media are no longer the villain. On TikTok, there are thousands of videos about witchy fashion, tarot readings, and magic. On Instagram, there are hundreds of thousands of posts under the tag #witchcore.
Photo: Daniel Simon via Vogue UK
In designer fashion, there has been an enamoration with the occult for quite some time. In 1993, Kate Moss walked down the runway at a Martine Sitbon show in a tunic and witch hat, clutching a cigarette instead of a wand. In 2007, Alexander McQueen designed his entire fall/winter collection around witchcraft and religious persecution after discovering that a distant relative had been a victim of the Salem Witch trials. Saint Laurent and Rick Owens explored the theme in 2013, Tom Ford in 2019, Simone Rocha and Gucci in 2020, Chanel and Paco Rabanne in 2021.
Photo: Dan Lecca via Harper’s Bazaar
So what does this current obsession with witches mean? In many ways, it represents a backlash against a turbulent political era. It is an outlet, especially for women, to reclaim their power, normalizing the darkness and mysticism exists within the female form. With the #MeToo movement and more recently, the rollback of Roe v. Wade, it is easy to see why women and designers are turning to feminine power.
In her book Caliban and the Witch, Sylvia Federici contends that the European witch trials occurred because of the advent of capitalism. In the way that men’s role in a capitalistic society is to provide labor, a woman’s role is to create labor; in other words, women have babies and then those babies become part of the workforce.
Women who were prosecuted during the witch hunts were those who failed, in one way or another, to fulfill this task. Women who had miscarriages and abortions, who were infertile, single women, older women, widows. If, for any reason, a woman couldn’t or wouldn’t bear children, she was at risk. Even women who held jobs, especially healers, herbalists, midwives, and any other practice that might have been viewed as magical, were persecuted. Once it started, a mass hysteria arose that couldn’t be stopped, and neighbors turned on neighbors, husbands on wives, and thousands of people died.
Photo: Richard Bush via Visual Optimism
Today, we are living in a world where the right to abortion is no longer protected. Each day, the rights of queer and trans people are being rolled back in dozens of states. A new sort of hysteria is starting.
Embracing witchcraft through fashion, media, and digital content is a tangible way of reclaiming individual expression and rebelling against gender norms. Witches represent independent female power, so identifying with them symbolizes a contemporary need for autonomy. It is solidarity, power, done stylishly.