The Danse Macabre: Fashion’s Enduring Fascination With Death and Mortality

The first thing a newborn baby touches upon entering the world is cloth—a towel or blanket wrapped around its shocked little body. And so, too, is a textile among the last things to touch us when we die, whether accompanying the body into the afterlife or decomposing alongside it.

From mourning dress and burial rituals to the preservation of loved ones’ garments, fashion and death have been inexorably intertwined across cultures and centuries. “People don’t really talk about death. It makes us uncomfortable, and it’s actually one of the only guarantees in life,” observes Dr. Denise Green, a fashion anthropologist, Cornell University professor, and director of the university’s Costume and Textile Collection, an archive of more than 10,000 objects dating back to the 17th century. “I think that’s probably one reason why we manage our feelings related to it through the clothes we wear.”

Across cultures, textiles have played a role in navigating the passage between life and death. While researching textiles and identity among the Hupacasath people of Vancouver Island, Green encountered traditions in which the deceased’s clothing was burned to release their ties to the physical world, allowing them to journey beyond the horizon. Meanwhile, among the Toraja people of Indonesia, the dead are traditionally wrapped in layers of patterned funerary textiles, while ceremonial cloth banners symbolize a pathway for the soul into the afterlife. In Ghana, the Asante people have historically worn adinkra mourning cloths, large fabric wrappers stamped with symbolic patterns using carved gourds and natural dyes to convey ancestral connection.

Beyond funerary rituals, death can also transform the significance of the garments we leave behind. “I love how even in contemporary traditions, death can change the object biography of clothing, where somebody’s ratty T-shirt that they wore every weekend then becomes the most prized possession for their grandkids or loved ones after they pass away,” says fashion researcher Sephra Lamothe, whose doctoral research at Cornell examines fashion and death.

In Western societies, clothing developed an elaborate visual language of mourning, communicating grief through colors, fabrics, and accessories. Ancient Romans wore dark wool togas known as togae pullae to mourn, while medieval Europe developed a rich visual culture surrounding death, including the danse macabre, an allegory depicting Death leading people from all walks of life, and memento mori, symbolic reminders of mortality often featuring skulls and skeletons. By the Renaissance, black mourning garments, veils, and headdresses distinguished grieving European aristocrats. As the merchant and middle classes expanded during the 18th century, mourning fashions once reserved for the upper classes became increasingly widespread.

By the Victorian era, particularly following Prince Albert’s death in 1861 and Queen Victoria’s subsequent four decades in mourning, bereavement had evolved into an elaborate system of social etiquette. “Wearing the clothes was a way of saying that to people visually. It was a material, symbolic speech act that’s telling everyone, ‘This is where I’m at,’” Green explains. Widows initially wore matte black crepe, concealing gowns, and heavily veiled bonnets before gradually transitioning to silk, lace, jet jewelry, and muted shades of gray, mauve, and lilac. Mourning jewelry could even incorporate the deceased’s hair; Lamothe recalls researching Victorian hair chokers, pieces that allowed their wearers to feel “the last vestiges of the body of the deceased against your skin.” Yet these conventions could be as restrictive as they were expressive, particularly for women, who were expected to publicly perform bereavement according to prescribed social rules.

By the turn of the 20th century, mourning attire had become a commercial industry, with ready-to-wear garments and accessories sold through department stores and catalogs. Yet as black became a defining color of modern fashion, most famously through Gabrielle Chanel’s little black dress of 1926, its association with mourning gradually loosened. “The appropriation of black into everyday dress has, in some way, removed the ability to identify people who are grieving out in the world,” Green says. “But it has also released people who are grieving from feeling like they have to wear black all the time.” Elaborate veils and rigid dress codes gradually gave way to more personal expressions of grief, while black dresses and tailoring became enduring wardrobe staples.

Yet even as the conventions of mourning dress faded, their influence endured, from Victorian-inspired lace and veils to the romantic darkness of contemporary gothic fashion. On the runway, designers have continued to explore mortality beyond the traditions of mourning, confronting death, grief, and the afterlife through increasingly imaginative expressions, from Alexander McQueen’s fall 1996 collection “Dante” to Comme des Garçons’ fall 2016 collection “The Ceremony of Separation.” As Green observes, “Clothing is always about negotiating our anxieties about the future. That is what fashion is, right? That’s why fashion changes.” And what future is more certain, yet more difficult to contemplate, than death?