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Every fashion week has its share of gowns, its parade of tailoring, its hopeful attempts at reinvention. But not every show offers you a peek into a city that doesn’t exist— citizens wear dark floral embellishments for everyday, the Filipiniana is laser-cut to resemble human bones, and the uncanny hangs in the air as thick as perfume. This was Bree Esplanada’s Phantasmagoria, a gothic, cutesy, surreal, and devastatingly fun collection.
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It began, as all good hauntings do, with an artist. James Ensor, the 19th-century Belgian whose grotesque masks and eerie theatrics rattled polite society, coined the term “phantasmagoria”. Esplanada, while researching for Ternocon 3, caught the word like a fever and never shook it. Months later, the fever broke into bountiful hems, exaggerated collars, and silhouettes that looked borrowed from characters in a play you can’t quite remember seeing.
“I can’t properly explain it,” he said of balancing beauty and eeriness. “But when I apply both, it just goes well in my eyes.” Indeed, the runway proved him right: sugary bows nestled against gothic blacks, angelic whites trailed by shadows, and garments that smiled and sneered at the same time.
Esplanada’s world may be imagined, but its shadows feel familiar. We’ve seen them flicker across Netflix’s Wednesday, in Jenna Ortega’s daggered shoulders on press conferences, and on New York Fashion Week Spring/Summer runways where the romantic goth is stirring again. Phantasmagoria doesn’t follow these echoes as it makes clear that the hunger for whimsy touched by darkness is still there and restless.
When it comes to world-building, the story always comes first for the illustrator and designer. “When I create pieces, I always ask myself: What would the people in an imaginary place called ‘Hollow City’ look like?” That is the task of his dual crafts; not to reconcile fantasy with reality, but to let the two tug at each other until the tension becomes wearable. Years of making clothes for both shows and clients gave the garments their grounding; the imagination gave them wings.
If Phantasmagoria were an emotion, Esplanada admits, it would be “wistful”. Perhaps that’s the trick of it: the collection makes you long for a place you’ve never been, a community of strange, beautiful beings you’ll never meet, though you’ve already started sketching them in your mind. Some would call this an escape.
On Bree Esplanada’s runway, survival was traded for play, and darkness was embroidered with delight. Fashion, at its best, can still be a séance: a gathering of spirits, real and imagined, brought together with a just little bit of mischief.
Photos courtesy of BENCH
