Spooky season is almost upon us and fashion’s favorite mystic Colleen Allen is leaning in with graveyard black and ghostly white gowns in various states of deshabille. Complimented by pops of purple and pumpkin orange, there were Halloween-y undertones to her spring collection, but what makes Allen exciting is that she’s both a little ghoulish and beguiling and she never approaches costume. 

In fact, the designer has upped her credibility on the red carpet lately with best-dressed placements on young Hollywood royalty like Mikey Madison and Ayo Edebiri. “The women who are attracted to the work, I think, are really powerful figures in culture, so to be able to see it in those big spaces is really satisfying,” she said via a Zoom call. 

As Allen continues to gain more exposure, how to walk the line between public and private, dressing for one’s self versus a man or another woman or even the world became questions she sought to answer. “I started thinking about how women used to have these wardrobes for domestic life that were really intimate, only for their husbands, and sort of the bizarreness of that and the darkness of it,” she explained. Allen found a kindred spirit in Sylvia Plath after reading her biography, saying “she’s so romantic and poetic, but there’s always that tension there.”  

Moving away from the structured tailoring of fall, Allen said she wanted to “get close to the body, to be softer and more vulnerable,” and in doing so hoped to subvert the expectations of female sexuality and “dismantle the fantasy.” 

Her “centerpiece” is an orange cloak in floral silk jacquard. Completely swaddling the model’s body in the look book, it left everything to the imagination, while the other centerpiece — a scanty lace bandeau bra — left very little to it.

Innerwear as outerwear walked many a runway this week, but Allen’s take felt less like it’s for putting on a show, inspired by her vintage collection spanning the 1920s to the ‘60s when lingerie was used for practicality underneath the clothes. But today, with naked dressing all the rage, few would second guess leaving the bedroom in a silk nightie or even a girdle-capri hybrid worn with an 18th-century frock jacket.

And they shouldn’t, since Allen’s work demands to be seen.