For her first-ever performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, in 2024, Chappell Roan dressed as a knight—fully armored, complete with a crossbow. Her look was reminiscent of a famous 1997 photograph of Fiona Apple for Life magazine, in which the singer stands in a crowded subway car, fitted in a knight’s plate of armor. Nearly two decades before Apple, Kate Bush posed like a medieval soldier for the music magazine Melody Maker. These artists announced their arrivals like latter-day Joans of Arc: not to be easily dismissed, not to be trifled with.
If you look at the spring 2026 runway shows, it seems that women from all walks of life are following those anti-ingenues’ lead. Burberry featured a shirt made of small diamond-shaped plates that looked like lamellar armor. Conner Ives created a gown with a druidesque hood. McQueen and Stefan Cooke showed chain mail dresses, while Chopova Lowena used the material to accent a velvet leg-of-mutton gown. Yuhan Wang went all in, presenting a chest plate.
The medieval aesthetic has decidedly European roots. The Middle Ages—which lasted roughly 1,000 years, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the start of the Renaissance—is considered to be the birth of fashion by many historians. Before then, European clothing consisted mostly of gender-neutral, figure-agnostic coverings. Through the Silk Road, new ways of dressing arrived in Europe. Tailoring became a necessity for men because of the newly widespread use of horses and full-body armor. As for women, dresses became more formfitting, with laces along the waist to create an hourglass silhouette. Simultaneously, an emerging class of merchants sought to get away from the tunics that peasants wore. The period brought “a new exaltation of individuality,” according to the French philosopher and sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky. “To be unique, to attract attention by displaying signs of difference—these became legitimate aspirations.”
A vintage illustration modeled after Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1854 painting of Joan of Arc.
In our own era, designers have often evoked medieval attire, from Paco Rabanne, who made dresses by linking aluminum discs and plates in the 1960s, to Vivienne Westwood, whose now famous 1989 Armor Ring referenced a knight’s glove. “It’s easy to wear, it’s comfortable, it fits on a lot of body shapes,” says Heather Mbaye, chair of the Medieval Dress and Textile Society, of the medieval silhouette. Plus, the styles are open to interpretation. “There’s a reason it was called the Dark Ages,” jokes costume researcher Leighton Bowers. “There’s not a ton of information about clothes, and a lot of what you find references the same sources.”
Case in point: Chain mail, often featured in eveningwear nowadays, was worn primarily for fighting, and the vast majority of women weren’t allowed to go into battle. The grand exception was, of course, Joan of Arc. But even she didn’t wear maille while leading the French army to victory during the Hundred Years’ War. King Charles VII gave her a suit of white armor, without any ornamentation. Some historians say that Joan didn’t even wear a helmet, so that people could see the face of the teenage girl who had been guided by angels to fight for France.
Is this new obsession with the Middle Ages a longing for a simpler era? Maybe and probably. At the very least, it’s clear that many of us need some form of armor to deal with modern life.
Runway, From left: Courtesy of Conner Ives; Courtesy of Chopova Lowena; Courtesy of Burberry; Courtesy of McQueen; Courtesy of Yuhan Wang; Courtesy of Colleen Allen; Courtesy of Stefan Cooke; Courtesy of Givenchy. Center: Getty Images.
