IN MUGLER WE TRUST

The invite arrived on an average day, the mundaneness of the pallid sky and watery light giving no indication that something out of the ordinary was going to happen. It was deep black. A lone leaf of glossy plastic punched with a single word and a series of coordinates. Did anyone dare? 

Maybe because of fear, rather than in spite of it, the summons was irresistible. Along with an oscillating chest and metronome heartbeat, terror is exclusive to the living. In corpse-cold hands, to rheumy eyes and lungs dyspnoeic with homogenous humility, this was an opportunity to inhale freedom and exhale individuality. It was outrageous and theatrical. It couldn’t have come any sooner.  

Casey Cadwallader’s macabre cry of risqué reinvention is hard to resist. Who among us doesn’t long to find out what else we could be if we were sexier, slinkier, more provocative?

The searchlights illuminated the mountains of disembodied limbs, the light bouncing off docked arms and faceless skulls imbued the undulating piles of bodies with a candescent glow. What appeared to be a divine graveyard was in fact a morgue of self-doubt and the scene of a sartorial exorcism as crawling figures coated in spiralling mesh and denim clambered towards a zenith of self-desire.  

If rapture was the destination, then lust was the potent fuel that powered the climb. It was an intoxicating longing that they had freebased to the point of the being fully possessed by a new fetish. It is fortunate that self-love is timeless.