Seduction Through Subtlety: Viewing Haider Ackermann’s “Défilé,” Through the Lens of Laban Movement Theory (2025)

There’s an unspoken stasis associated with fashion, with pieces thought of as fixed objects. Consequently, fashion is viewed in two ways: visual craft, or a product in a commercial industry. Editorial spreads, frozen catwalk stills, and store mannequins all present garments as enviable items. But clothing is more than a commodity to the bodies that wear it. Scholars have long argued for fashion’s status as art rather than mere craft, pointing to the ways it not only reflects culture but also shapes it. While there is extensive and ever-growing research on fashion's role in culture, storytelling, and socio-political commentary, a critical gap remains: the relationship between clothing and the moving body. Although fashion scholarship often centers on design, identity, or commerce, it largely overlooks the dynamic interplay between garment and wearer. 

The relationship between fashion and the body has been academically examined through frameworks of identity, focusing on how clothing can be a tool of augmentation, embodiment, and expression. Joanne Entwistle in "Fashion and the Fleshy Body: Dress as Embodied Practice” argues that dress is inseparable from the situated body, framing clothing as both a social practice and a bodily experience (Entwistle 26). In “The Embodied Turn: Making and Remaking Dress as an Academic Practice” Hilary Davidson similarly emphasizes how historical garments shape and constrain movement, foregrounding the tactile realities of dress (Davidson 45). Julianne Hesselbein explores the sensory experiences of wearing clothing in “Walking the Catwalk: From Dressed Body to Dressed Embodiment,” offering a phenomenological approach to fashion’s embodied qualities (Hesselbein 113). While these works center the body, they largely overlook movement as a category of critical inquiry. Sarah Duggan bridges fashion and theatricality in "The Greatest Show on Earth: A Look at Contemporary Fashion Shows and 

Their Relationship to Performance Art" by examining runway as affective performance, and Judith Richards discusses performativity in fashion presentation, yet neither employs a consistent analytic method to assess how movement structures meaning (Duggan 58; Richards 92). Existing scholarship tends to treat movement as a binary between dynamic and static, rather than a complex, multidimensional component integral to fashion’s form and function. Through introducing Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) as a methodology for understanding Haider Ackermann’s debut with Tom Ford for the 2025 Autumn/Winter season, I aim to offer a more systematic way to understand the overlooked depths of fashion. Applying movement theories such as LMA to runway shows reveals fashion as a kinetic and embodied art form that is not contained in the garment alone; it is activated through the body, shaped by its form, and revealed through its movement.