The importance of Frankenstein in fashion How the book and the creature of Mary Shelley continues to inspire designers

A bet: write the best tale of terror. Following this idea a group of writers composed by the doctor and novelist John Polidori, the poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley and his partner, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin challenged themselves. Closed in a house on the shores of Lake Geneva in June 1816, the same that will soon be nicknamed "the year without a summer", they spend their time telling each other curious ghost stories. The gloomy sky, "broken" by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia is flooded with wind, rain and lightning. Meteorologists and real nightmares live into the mind of a young nineteen-year-old girl named Mary (after the marriage Shelley) and take shape from her pen to become the first science fiction novel in history. The labor of childbirth, the loss of new-born children, the illness that from an early age forces her to hold her arm in swaddling clothes, mingle with the many dissertations on philosophy and medicine made with friends before the fire merging into the pages of Frankenstein or the modern Prometeo, published anonymously in 1817 and with the author's name only in the second edition of 1831. The theme of creation and painful monstrosity are just some of the nuances that make the story of Baron Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the unhappy aristocrat and tormented, who, confident in the progress of modern science, wants to create a human being, intelligent, but incapable of feeling pain, but ending up giving life to an unhappy creature, burned by loneliness and by the rejection of others.

A character so iconic and psychologically complex to be presented again in dozens and dozens of cinematographic works: from the famous 1930s trilogy with Boris Karloff to the one directed by Kenneth Branagh starring Robert DeNiro, from the cult parody Frankenstein Junior directed by Mel Brooks to the dark-romantic version that appeared in the beautiful TV series Penny Dreadful.

There is something in Gothic novels that torments and inspires art, cinema and fashion in an eternal way. It does not matter whether it is Frankenstein or the equally iconic Bram Stoker's Dracula, reworking these characters who are at the same time romantic, dark and immediate to recognize is how to exorcise their fears, mirror the turbid, the pain mixed with hope that pervades every human.