Photo Credits: Elsa Hosk/Reproduction
Some garments are worn. Others are inhabited. And then there are the rare few that feel summoned—called forth from the depths of fashion’s collective memory to speak once more. On the Cannes 2025 red carpet, Elsa Hosk did not simply wear an archival Thierry Mugler creation. She entered it. She embodied it. And in doing so, she transformed a moment of glamour into a ritual of reverence.
Photo Credits: Elsa Hosk/Reproduction
The gown in question—first unveiled in Thierry Mugler’s Fall/Winter 1995–1996 haute couture collection was originally worn by Claudia Schiffer, herself a mythic figure of 1990s runway lore. It is a piece born of alchemy: a crystal-embellished illusion dress that appears at once molten and metallic, soft and sculptural. With its liquid transparency and precisely placed gleaming teardrops, the dress contours the body not to reveal it, but to elevate it into iconography.
Credits: Mugler/Reproduction
Credits: Mugler/ Reproduction
What Elsa Hosk achieved in resurrecting this silhouette was far more than homage. It was resurrection without replication. While the Mugler original was charged with the theatrical bravado of its time bold shoulders, cinched waist, near-mythical femininity, Hosk wore it with an air of introspective power. Her styling was restrained, her expression unhurried. She allowed the gown’s language to emerge not through spectacle, but through stillness. It was as if she had removed the static of nostalgia to let the garment speak anew.
Draped over one shoulder, the accompanying oversized fur stole—voluminous, unapologetic—became not an accessory but an atmosphere. It wrapped around her like memory itself, softening the edges of the sculptural gown beneath. And in this interplay between the sharp and the sumptuous, between the 1990s and the now, Hosk reimagined Mugler’s original intent: not as a costume of power, but as a portrait of it. Less dominion, more grace. Less provocation, more poetry.
Photo Credits: Elsa Hosk/Reproduction
Elsa Hosk’s presence reminded us that haute couture is not anchored in trend, but in time suspended. It lives where mastery meets mythology. In choosing to wear an archival Mugler, she did not reach back—she reached inward, drawing a continuous line between past and present, between Claudia and herself, between designer and muse. It was not simply a moment of fashion history revisited. It was history rewritten with breath, bone, and poise.
Credits: Getty Images
Photo Credits: Elsa Hosk/Reproduction
At The Runway Source, we believe couture becomes eternal when it transcends its season. Elsa Hosk, in this embodiment of Mugler, offered not just a look, but a meditation—on legacy, on lineage, and on the quiet, luminous power of a woman entirely at home in her silhouette.
