Runway shows are the furnace of the fashion industry. The lights, music, models turning … this is where months of ideas and toiles come to life in a way that can send a shiver down the spine. It fires the imagination. The hierarchy of who gets in, and who sits where, makes it a ritual as much as theatre, and the clothes being shown have a ceremonial aspect. They are to be looked at, not touched, by anyone not involved in the innermost cabal of the défilé. They appear for minutes, then vanish into an archive. But not always. Sometimes they have another life – and not just the ones that are duplicated for retail. For the truly obsessive, having that actual object worn on the occasion matters more than anything else. They don’t want something off the rack. They want to own something that was part of the moment, that will become part of history.

In 2023, art director Simon Costin cleared out his studio and happened upon an archive of pieces he had made for Alexander McQueen’s early London shows. In one box: a headpiece made from taxidermy guinea-fowl claws, black semiprecious stones, lace and 1920s tulle with sequins, worn by Kristen McMenamy at the A/W 1996 Dante show at Christ Church in Spitalfields, London. On the night, McMenamy wore it with a military-style matador coat with gold braid. The coat was one of three made – one was produced to sell at Liberty, one for Isabella Blow, and the catwalk piece ended up selling in 2020 at the RR auction house in New Hampshire for over $50,000. Costin sold the accompanying headpiece for £60,000 at Kerry Taylor in London in 2023.

“I remember the show well,” he tells me. “The church was quite decrepit back then, with huge holes in the floor and freezing cold. Lee [McQueen] was always happy for any of us to keep the things we made as long as we had paid for their creation.” As well as the headpiece, Costin went on to sell three of the now iconic masks many of the models wore – simple black party eye masks with white crucifixes attached, inspired by props from Joel-Peter Witkin’s photo-art works. He still has four of them. Kanye West hired a mask from an unnamed buyer for an undisclosed amount to wear to the Super Bowl last year. “Unlike the collection – most of which would go into production – the props, jewellery and headdresses were usually one-off pieces and so that much more unique,” says Costin. “Collectors will always be drawn to that rarity and revel in the ownership of something which reflects the story of the moment and the emotions experienced at that point in time.”

Photo: Mark C O’Flaherty

It’s become a trend for celebrities to wear historic runway one-offs on the red carpet. Anyone can order couture, but to get access to significant one-off artefacts is impressive. American actor Zendaya wore a silver cyborg suit from Thierry Mugler’s 1995 couture collection for the premiere of Dune: Part Two this past February, and Kim Kardashian made headlines when she wore Marilyn Monroe’s Bob Mackie-designed “Happy Birthday, Mr President” dress to the Met Gala in 2022. In both cases, some people in fashion were dismayed that museum-grade pieces with such an important legacy had been worn at all. But in some cases, a new one-off establishes its legacy through celebrity association.

When young London-based designer Bradley Sharpe showed an extraordinary black gown as part of his S/S 2022 collection, Lady Gaga bought it, and Nick Knight shot her in it to create visuals for her Chromatica Ball world tour, seen by 834,000 people worldwide. “It consisted of a Victorian oversized bonnet, upside-down hooded raincoat and an eight-metre-long gown skirt,” says Sharpe. “All were made with an old painting and decorating tarp which was dyed, coated in latex and washed to create a destructed raincoat-looking material.” Lady Gaga could see it was singular and magnificent, but not everyone understood the craft that had gone into it. “After all that work, the press wrote it up as being made of bin bags!” laughs Sharpe.

Some contemporary designers have worked out a system to appease their best customers who want runway one-offs, particularly designers who create extraordinary show pieces that are often presented purely to create a mood on the runway. Viktor&Rolf has always let a few of its most dramatic showpieces go to select individuals and institutions, as has Iris van Herpen, who uses digital printing and other high tech to create couture garments. The Red collection by Marine Serre is made up largely of one-off pieces made for her shows, and Thom Browne’s studio has an arrangement in place with a handful of clients whereby they make a one-of-one of a runway piece and archive the sample. A selection of coats was ordered by one client that had been seen at The Shed in Hudson Yards as part of Browne’s Edgar Allan Poe-themed show in February 2023, which will never be produced for retail.

“A lot of the samples for our shows are made by interns,” says Charles Jeffrey, who was the subject of a 10-year retrospective at Somerset House in the summer of 2024. To many, his distinctive, irreverent, tartan-heavy style has made him the natural successor to the late Vivienne Westwood. “If someone I know wants one of those pieces, I will have it remade so it’s perfect. A lot of the early pieces I did were loaned to friends to enjoy, and they just never gave them back. But that’s fine – I wanted people to enjoy them,” he explains. When Simon Costin art directed two shows for Jeffrey in 2019 and 2020, Jeffrey gifted him a giant tartan scarf in red and blue in the shape of a fox.

Photo: Dan Lecca

As with Thom Browne, Simone Rocha has started creating a handful of pieces from runway looks for sale to select clients. A spokesperson for the studio explains: “Since the flagship stores opened in London, New York and Taipei, there have been a lot more direct customer requests. We make a small edition of show pieces just for our own stores, and these are made in the London atelier, not at our factories.”

There are some designers who show on the couture calendar in Paris whose work is, by its very nature, exclusive and one of one. Before Julie de Libran launched her own label in 2019, she was artistic director of Sonia Rykiel, and before that worked with Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton, and created the made-to-measure atelier for Prada in Paris. She creates chic womenswear that sells at her own boutique in the 7th arrondissement, but her most rarefied pieces are one-off dresses created from end-of-roll fabrics. Her shows are usually staged in her home, for a select audience of customers and press. There were garments this season in gorgeous dark-green brocade silks with handmade sequin flowers, and a jacquard silk slip dress layered with a bronze sequin mesh poncho.

One of her most loyal customers, who wanted to remain anonymous, explains the appeal of having the actual garment shown on a model at the presentation: “Having a one-off garment is the epitome of supporting my own love of craft and artisanal things. Purchasing from Julie supports those who create beauty, from the designer to all those who are behind the scenes using the old techniques and ways. Just like a painting, it feels incredibly special to own or wear something only you have.”

Photo: Ben Broomfield

As well as those who want to wear the clothes, there are those collectors who really do see runway pieces as objets d’art. Although he sold a significant percentage of it recently at auction, Brighton-based Steven Philip has one of the most enviable collections of fashion – largely from the 1980s and 1990s, with a strong focus on independent London designers of the period, like John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood, but also extraordinary pieces by performance artist Leigh Bowery, and rare garments by key Japanese designers from the 1970s onwards. For Philip, his pursuit of garments is curatorial: he wants to put together whole ensembles, right down to the accessories, exactly as they would have appeared on the runway. Many of the pieces in his collection are one-of-one. He managed to get his hands on pieces from John Galliano’s graduate collection from 1984 – Les Incroyables – including a silk patterned waistcoat with buttons fashioned out of antique coins. He also has a shirt, waistcoat and jacket from Galliano’s subsequent Afghanistan Repudiates Western Ideals show, from S/S 1985. “My obsession with Galliano’s early designs is about the thought that went into the work,” says Philip. “He had, and has, such knowledge about how to shape and work with fabric. I don’t know where some of those early silhouettes came from. They are truly incredible and still look radical.”

Among some of the more intriguing one-offs in Philip’s collection is a pair of McQueen gold high heels with a gold nude figure with dragonfly wings on the T-bar. “I was given them by someone working at McQueen,” he says. “They were never put into production after they were seen at the show, because Lalique said the design was too similar to some of their early jewellery designs.” Then there are the bizarre A/W 1990 John Galliano jackets that sold at Kerry Taylor last year – one in an acid green went for £650 (nothing compared to the £160,000 that a kimono from Galliano’s The Ludic Game A/W 1985 collection went for in an earlier sale).

Photo courtesy of Alexander McQueen

Runway samples tell amazing stories: at the very start of his career, Galliano was the boy wonder reinventing fashion. By the turn of the decade, the vapours of New Romanticism were over, and rave had taken over. His A/W 1990 Fencing collection, and the orange and green Lycra tops he was selling at Hyper Hyper around the time showed a visionary designer disastrously trying to stay on trend. He was also broke, and the only backing he could get for the collection and show was from Warner Bros, who insisted on Bugs Bunny motifs on the clothes, as well as Bugs Bunny cartoons being screened on the catwalk. Galliano styled the models so that the motifs were hidden, and the monitors didn’t work. To smooth things over with Warner Bros after the show, Galliano made a one-off blouson jacket for the CEO’s wife in black moiré fabric, with Bugs Bunny in white thread on the back. A total oddity, it sold at Kerry Taylor for £1,200.

The weirdness of that Bugs Bunny jacket tells us just how much fashion has changed. The days of being able to create a brand as a kind of art project are long gone. Runway shows were once staged for next to nothing in London, and models were paid in clothes – which is how so many of those runway samples have ended up at auction. You can’t stage anything for less than £10,000 today, and a major show in Paris or Milan is at least ten times that amount.

A John Galliano black moiré bomber jacket, 'Fencing' collection, Autumn-Winter 1990-91 from The Mr Steven Philip Collection). photo courtesy of Kerry Taylor Auctions

The market for seen-on-runway early McQueen has the most heat and hype on it. At the time of writing, there is an alpaca and angora coat from the 1996 Dante collection listed by an online vintage retailer with an asking price of £429,192. Simon Ungless, who worked on all of McQueen’s prints, finds it risible: “I can tell that it’s from the commercial production that was done in Italy; it’s not the coat that was in the show.” Ungless worked with McQueen before anything was actually produced to sell in shops. It’s part of fashion lore that stylist Isabella Blow bought McQueen’s whole graduate collection after she saw it in 1992, but for his first six collections, and five shows, none of the iconoclastic garments that caused such uproar and excitement was ever commercially produced. It was only after The Hunger in 1996 that you could go into a shop and buy something. Even then, it was scarce. For some McQueen obsessives, it’s the samples that represent the purity of his vision. Ungless recently went to The Met in New York to see a jacket from The Birds 1994 collection, for which he created the distinctive swallow print. The jacket was shown horizontally, in a glass case, as part of its summer Sleeping Beauties fashion exhibition – showing pieces too fragile ever to be worn again.

Ungless also went to see two pieces from the A/W 1995 Highland Rape collection, on show at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville. “It was quite amazing, revisiting these old friends,” he says. “All of these pieces were show pieces back then. We weren’t really doing production, and I don’t think anyone ever considered an archive or that these pieces would become anything more than what they were. Garments were given as trade to people who worked on the collection. A few were sold and some were stolen. It’s quite fortunate some people kept things. And the pieces are amazing. Nothing was done in a premeditated way trying to make money, it wasn’t about trying to sell things. It was about change and fun. Work for no commercial gain always produces the best things.” It can, of course, also produce something priceless for the future, both in terms of the story it tells, and what it changes hands for.

Header Illustration © Oleg Borodin