The Figure of the Armour

The Figure of the Armour runs through these works as a central metaphor for the contemporary condition: that of a body aware of its own fragility, compelled to reinvent itself in order to survive within an unstable world. Here, armour appears less as an instrument of war than as a second skin, an extension of the self where the tensions between protection and exposure, between defence and desire, are continuously replayed.

In Naiza Khan’s work, armour takes the form of steel corsets and skirts, empty garments, shaped in the image of the female body, yet deserted by flesh. These objects carry the memory of an absence (that of the vulnerable body they claim to protect) and question the boundary between constraint and resistance. The armour becomes both imprint and negative, a trace of a vanished body and a symbol of a subjectivity that refuses to be possessed.

Fangophilia radicalises this idea: its metallic prosthetics mould directly to the wearer’s anatomy, fusing the organic and the mineral. The armour is no longer a shell but a physical extension of the body, a materialisation of the desire for autonomy and transformation.

This cyborg-like body echoes the thought of Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, marking the entry into a posthuman condition where vulnerability itself becomes a creative force. With Kei Ninomiya, couture turns into protective architecture. The silhouettes of the SS24 collection, black, perforated, almost vegetal structures, express the tension between hardness and transparency. The armour here does not imprison: it supports, it shapes, it allows the body to stand, to exist within the contained beauty of constraint. Even Ren Faire, through humour and parody, extends this symbolism: its cardboard and leather armours embody the human need to replay protection, to invent mythologies in order to withstand the disorientation of reality. Costume, like armour, becomes refuge, a necessary fiction.