It's a SIGN

The chronically online way to catalogue fashion's obsession with astrology.

- VINCENT ONG

Humanity has always looked to the stars for guidance or inspiration, so it should be no surprise that fashion has followed suit. Heck, even TikTok was once inundated with “how to dress for your Venus sign” or some other particular placement of the houses on your birth chart.

So to say that the fascination with the stars and the fates is alive and well is to downplay it. Astrology in fashion traverses the gap between introductory, goal-oriented situational dressing and the loftier concepts of capital-F fashion. It is inescapable, even for those who don’t subscribe to its logic.

But perhaps it is exactly its lack of logic, the appeal to emotion and identity that makes astrology even more seductive.

In both Eastern and Western cultures, the placement of the celestial bodies at the time of birth is inherently tied to one’s personality and even one’s destiny. Whether you accept it or thrash against it is entirely up to you. Others even find a weird in-between where they use astrology to define who they are not. (Think: Garance Dore once wrote on her defunct blog that Scott Schuman is such a Scorpio for refusing to believe in the pseudoscience.)

Whether you want to look at it from a shopper-consumer standpoint or an intellectualised peek behind show notes, this philosophy of defining who we are and who we are not also applies. Even if every designer were to take on the subject, each would come out differently — and they have, which we've cherry-picked for your reading pleasure.

MYSTIC HEAVENLY BODIES