At Coachella, the Victorian tradwife got a punk rock makeover

There’s something in the air and it smells like rosewater and...mothballs. Fashion has gone into a full-blown Victorian relapse, but this time it’s not the polished pearls or modest hemlines we’re after. It’s chaos and disarray. Think tattered bustles, fraying lace, and panniers with a side of punk. Ellen Hutter’s succubus-chic style is no longer confined to Nosferatu’s dream sequences. It’s showing up at fashion week, it’s on the main stage at Coachella, and of course, amongst the millions of OOTD entries on TikTok and Instagram.

The obsession with Victoriana has always lingered in fashion’s collective imagination. It was an era defined by contradiction: repressed desire, overwrought dress codes, and a fetish for control. But the goth redux isn’t romanticising its constraints. Instead, it’s dismantling them, piece by piece. This revival started with that Maison Margiela couture collection from January 2024 that is practically seared in everyone’s memory by now. The 19th-century-coded garments looked lived-in, unravelled by time. Painfully cinched waists and decomposing fabrics were everywhere. It wasn’t nostalgia, it was necromancy. John Galliano transformed the runway into a séance, summoning the spectres of high fashion past and dressing them for the present. It was something Dame Vivienne Westwood pioneered in the 1980s with the Mini-Crini skirt and several spins on the humble corset—taking it from innerwear to erotically charged outerwear. Her piece de resistance, though, was the iconic Faux Cul, or ‘fake-bum’ bag, a derrière-enhancing accessory Westwood designed in collaboration with Louis Vuitton in 1996.

The influence was evident at this year’s Coachella, where the aesthetic got headliner status and almost worked like an unofficial dress code. Lady Gaga opened her five-act pop opera in a Victorian-style red velvet gown inspired by Thierry Mugler’s costumes for the 1985 stage production of Macbeth. It came with a massive Brutalist skirt that doubled as a stage prop. Her countless outfit changes included a distressed white dress by Turkish-British designer Dilara Fındıkoğlu and a moth-eaten corseted ensemble by Matières Fécales, a brand-new couture label founded by street-style provocateurs Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran. Indie musician Marina performed in a custom look by American designer Erik Charlotte, featuring a hand-dyed satin corset and taffeta bubble skirt, while The Marías singer María Zardoya channelled a gothic bride in a white corset dress accessorised with a crucifix. Even fashion girl Julia Fox was seen in a nude corset paired with bum-baring lace-up shorts—a cowgirl-meets-Victoriana hybrid.

On the spring/summer and fall/winter 2025 runways too there was a deconstruction of feminine codes. Think of Jonathan Anderson’s pared-down take on the hoop skirt or how frilly bloomers and pantaloons, more 19th-century innerwear, dominated at Chloé and Valentino. Charli XCX sported a pair of the frilly lace shorts too, hers by designer Natasha Zinko, during her set at Coachella, wearing them under a chunky leather and metal-detail belt.

What’s interesting, though, is how women today are not simply referencing vintage silhouettes and fabrics—they’re reinventing them. The original corset was meant to contain the body. Now, it exaggerates it. The bustle once added volume for the male gaze; now it distorts proportions in a way that’s deliberately unsettling. Everything comes together like an act of aposematism. This is fashion as theatre, as rebellion, as reclamation. Perhaps it’s a response to modern chaos—a longing for structure, albeit on our own terms. Or maybe it’s the thrill of taking something traditional, tearing it apart, and turning it into a feminist statement.

Closer to home, Anamika Khanna has pioneered the chaos-couture look with her signature shredded pantsuits and sarees with visibly ripped surfaces, worn by It girls like Banita Sandhu, Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, or Ananya Panday. “The distressed and deconstructed aesthetic has always resonated deeply with me because it represents a certain kind of raw honesty,” says Khanna. “There’s beauty in imperfection, in things that are undone, frayed, or asymmetrical—it speaks to the idea that fashion doesn’t have to be polished to be powerful. It mirrors life itself—layered, unpredictable, and evolving.”