This dress:

Bancroft's language manages to be both dense and lively, and layers of research perpetuate every idea. Describing clothes isolated from their wearers, Bancroft references Sigmund Freud's concept of the uncanny. Whether displayed in cases or strewn on floors, all empty garments take on "a sinister otherworldliness," she writes. She cites the Greek legend of Procrustes, who "forced his victims to lie on a bed that he made them fit [into] by cutting off or stretching" their limbs. One great segment discusses the function of fashion photography and how it draws upon the "fundamental asymmetry of desire." Another details a McQueen ensemble from his La Poupée collection—it has a square metal frame attached by shackles to the model's arms and thighs to provoke an upsetting "jerkiness" and "artificiality" in her movement, "like a doll being 'walked' along the floor by a child's hands," Bancroft says, and with this, McQueen "is staging a brutality of feminine experience."

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Remember this asshole? He's in the news again:

Heath Campbell entered a New Jersey courthouse Monday dressed in a full Nazi uniform, donning a trimmed mustache reminiscent of Adolf Hitler — the man he named his firstborn child after.
...
Henrich's three Nazi-named siblings — Adolf Hitler, 7, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation, 6, and 5-year-old Honzlynn Jeannie — had already been placed in foster care in 2009. The move came a month after the family gained national attention when a ShopRite refused to write "Happy Birthday Adolf Hitler" on a birthday cake.

He's just straight-up trolling the world now.

• AMANDA PAREDES / SWAE PHOTOGRAPHY

Stone Crow designer Jenn Charkow's garments impart the ragged majesty that accompanies experiences of personal anxiety. "It's mostly about that moment when you're finally able to put yourself together after having some manic breakdown," Jenn says, describing a deep-wilderness fashion photography series with models in voluminous gowns. A woman has come to the woods to empty her mind, and the scenes she inhabits recall certain folklores—the ones with the beautiful lady-ghosts who're really into singing lullabies and vanishing into thick shadows, or just hanging out and mourning. "There's something so appealing about the dark romance, and this whole intense longing, and of being tucked away somewhere," Jenn says.

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These vests:

• DEVON YAN-BERRONG

Embodying the sheen of 1970s-era retro-futurism, his other designs contain sunburst angles and flat colors and general spotlessness. Devon's models come off as well-kept women, hardened by privilege. One with long, fluffy hair has a columnar dress of pleated chiffon that descends into falls, or spreads and trails with movement. The gloves she's wearing are fitted so tight and scooped so deep that her hands seem to have been dipped, just past the knuckles, into buckets of paint. More mod details creep in: dangling, Edie Sedgwick–style tasseled earrings; curls flattened, glossed, and pasted onto foreheads; and hats with domed shapes, as if the thoughts drifting up got trapped inside, forming balloons.

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This mohawk:

This singlet:

See more fashionable men at the Eagle right over here!

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This bear paw:

See more lumberjack fashion—and vote for your favorite—here!

Loads of Nagel's paintings also appeared in Playboy magazine, and to remind the readers of their essential manly nature, Nagel dressed his coldly alluring subjects in leg warmers, spike heels, and bikini panties, then showcased their naked boobs in inventive ways: jackets slung open, dresses cut low, or camisoles pulled down. If the images were real people, they'd be compulsively immersed in hobbies involving mauve seashell collectibles or recreational cocaine usage, while living in spartan apartments with stucco ceilings and white carpet and black leather couches and water beds and venetian blinds, and every time you dropped by they'd be listening to the best song you ever heard in your life. "I don't think I want to know these women too well. They never come out in the sunlight. They stay up late and smoke and drink a lot," Karl Bornstein recalls Nagel saying, in the coffee table book Nagel: The Art of Patrick Nagel.

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This skull:

See more pretty Portland party outfits (and vote for your favorite) here!

• TOMBOY EXCHANGE

TomboyX's capsule line contains plush cotton sports blazers and high-end polo shirts in check prints or earth-tone solids; an additional selection of caps, T-shirts, cargo pants, and golf skorts is coming soon. For their fit model, Naomi and Fran deliberately chose a middle-aged woman who wears size 12, which is a refreshing change. Large-scale, corporate shit shows often rely on fantasy bodies to fulfill this utilitarian role, even though those fantasies have nothing to do with who we really are or what we really need. "We're not 20 years old, we're not a size 0, and nor do we want to be," says Fran. "We're tomboys making clothes for tomboys."

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• CHONA KASINGER

Krista's work often plays up paradoxical combinations. (Prior to this, she was best known for her transformations of vintage T-shirts into underpants.) Hoyden's geometric mini-sleeves and high-low hems are trending now, while the slacks' scalloped cuffs were pulled directly from long-forgotten '30s-era golf-wear styles. Other more distant influences include '40s garments, like floaty blouses, with their heavily padded shoulders; those were so wildly popular, they made their way into nightgowns for a time.

Krista also collects images from the constructivism and Bauhaus art movements, with their clean lines, strange tensions, and flat blocks of color. Her hues of dawns, apricots, and pastel pinks recall the cheeks of porcelain dolls, though as it happens, this same palette was also used for the "protection costumes" made of "pure oiled silk" detailed in 1939 London Harvey Nichols store advertisements, in a time when women lived each day in full catastrophe mode, as stylishly as possible: "The wearer can cover a distance of two hundred yards through mustard gas and the suit can be slipped over ordinary clothes in thirty-five seconds." As a suggested accessory, "a special pair of mittens... designed to cover up the head space unprotected by the ordinary gas mask."

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This leather jacket:

• MOLLY BAUER

The name alludes to dazzle camouflage, a WWI-era ship-painting technique that used oblique grids to form illusions, distorting familiar shapes. Similarly, Harvey designed a camouflage to rupture certain patterns that algorithmic software programs like Google and Facebook use to identify images of human faces. Once these ideas got into Bronwyn's head, they would not leave her imagination alone.

"A diagonal line works really well. Anything that'll break up the symmetry," Bronwyn says. She experiments by drawing strange patterns on her skin, using sponsor Atomic Cosmetics' cream foundations, in colors ranging from "clown white to ink black to really fair to super pale to pretty dark." She tests each look by running her digital portrait through a customized program. When it registers Bronwyn's face, it frames the area with a red box, but if her makeup is right, Bronwyn will slip past without detection.

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This tie:

See more sizzlin' red hot fashion (and vote for your favorite) here!

This crown:

Jean Paul Gaultier designed the costuming, which is not surprising. His work has a tendency to appear in movies that embody hallucinatory worlds, including The City of Lost Children and The Fifth Element. (The latter's gorgeously absurd airline-stewardess dresses inspired local designer Aubrey McMillan.) Many of Gaultier's styles in The Cook pull details from his signature bondage-y ensembles, with their cage crinolines, cinched waists, and intricate straps. As Georgina, Helen Mirren pairs ostrich-feather accessories with intricate hairdos, all lacquered and swirling, and her garments change colors as she moves from room to room. Restaurant waitstaff uniforms manage to seem both servile and regal, with combinations of epaulets and gold tassels, meticulous white gauntlets, and shiny plastic corsets, while the transparent forks and spoons stacking the chest in horizontal rows impart a sci-fi-nutcracker-magic-majorette effect. As the pathological lunatic Albert, Michael Gambon and his accompanying thugs dole out abuse by jamming objects into victims' mouths: book pages, spoon handles, wooden buttons, belly buttons. They resemble 17th-century cardinals, with red sashes and delicate lace collars draped over finely tailored suits.

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This Cher tee:

Watch for voluminous sleeve caps fastened on with buttons, pleated neckwear "like an ecclesiastical dickey," quilted thigh pads, a chest plate of swollen knots made from batting-stuffed tubes, cocoon-shaped outerwear resembling "a Fabergé egg that you can peer into and see all the smocking inside," and another form that "started as a jacket-y situation but then became a ball."

The apparel of The Dowsing manages to seem both pure and timeworn. The shapes are basic and flowing and embellished with details like darning-stitched knees to suggest use and repairs, and a palette of deliberately washed-out colors: "It's what happens when you wear a garment again and again and again. Black becomes bleach black or rust black or blood black." To make an actual rust-tone trim, Anna soaked bias tape in a salve made of water, vinegar, and steel wool. And she transformed silk from beige to an ash brown by singeing the fabric: "It sort of melts. It doesn't really catch fire. Well, it does every once in a while."

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These pants:

• JANIETA EYRE

Janieta is compelled by twin imagery. One delightful legend suggests she is the lone survivor of a conjoined set: "That's a rumor, and I have no idea whether it's true or not," she says. "The body itself is like a garment—it can be changed... And when I [observe twins together], I see how differently they wear their bodies," she says. Similarly, Janieta transforms for her pictures, then arranges herself in stark rooms, among mutilations, dolls, flowers, dildos. Her narratives are rooted in costuming. "I'll start with a piece of clothing and create the character and development around it," she says. This might be a Value Village garment she "cuts apart, reassembles, alters, and puts back together again," while past rigorous apparel journeys turned up corsets, balaclavas, Mickey Mouse ears, crinolines, WWII-era gas masks, and nuns' winged cornettes. Objects can get incorporated, too: A cheese grater becomes a necklace pendant. So does a dead albatross.

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These feathers: