A brief history of rabbits in fashion From Vivienne Westwood to Marni

Even in a society like ours, where symbolism, beliefs and rituals have been supplanted by the rational laws of marketing and finance, there are some symbols that survive the centuries. One of these is the rabbit, an animal that today we associate primarily with Easter, but which through various cultural incarnations (think Bugs Bunny and the White Rabbit, the most famous) have retained their role as mythological tricksters, liminal creatures symbolic of perpetual natural change and fertility, metaphors of prudence and fear but also of witchcraft, lust and purity together (such as the Playboy Bunnies). The rabbit, in short, is an animal many meanings for our civilization are layered, which often, through its carnivalesque representation, have leaked into the world of fashion as well. One of the most unthinkable fashion recurrences, for example, is that of the designer bowing at the end of the fashion show disguised as a rabbit: Tiziano Mazzilli and Louise Michelsen began when they closed their brand Voyage's show in Milan in 2003, followed by Alexander McQueen who appeared to greet dressed as a rabbit at the end of his SS09 show, then it was Francesco Risso's turn to disguise himself in the same way for the finale of Marni's FW20 show while the last to do so was Virgil Abloh who wore a hat with rabbit ears at the Met Gala 2021. But these are isolated cases. Many more are those in which rabbits have appeared on the runway - cases that, by the way, have been multiplying over the years as if, as time has passed, the public has begun to find new and relevant correspondences between today's world and the iconographic archetype of the rabbit.

After a series of other appearances that included Olympia Le-Tan and Coach, the rabbit landed first in AF Vandevorst's FW15, again in the form of a hat signed by Stephen Jones, and then, most strikingly, in Prada's FW16 collection in which sweaters and women's dresses were plastered with the image of a rabbit that, in this case, seemed to evoke a kind of post-modern infantilism, courting the world of athletic, activewear crashing formalwear. The following year it was Rick Owens who sent several models with rabbit-eared-like headdresses down the runway for his FW17 collection, Glitter, created with the idea of ceremony and ritual in mind and definitely denoted by a pagan or esoteric vibe. The American designer, in any case, has been frequenting the symbol for years: one of his permanent long sellers is a rabbit-shaped bag introduced first in FW08 as the Mink Fur Bag and then reiterated from FW10 onward in the HUNRICKOWENS line. The following season it was Alessandro Michele, for Gucci's SS18 show, one of his most celebrated collections, who brought rabbits back to the runway in two versions: the first being Bug Bunny, and thus a reference to pop culture that the designer cheerfully remixed together with vintage and ultramodern designs; the second the embroidery of a rabbit that, together with similar representations of animals such as snakes, winged tigers and lambs, evoked that mystical Romanesque cathedral zoology that Michele favored. The following July, during Couture Week in Paris, Bertrand Guyon, then Schiapparelli's designer, brought gold rabbit masks and long-eared satin dresses to the brand's show - an homage to the extravagant looks the founder wore for her Parisian soirées.

And here we come to the most recent seasons: Egonlab, S.S. Daley and Ambush used the iconography of the rabbit for their SS23 collections, the former in the form of a pop element and with a reference to Alice in Wonderland's White Rabbit; the latter, on the other hand, used the rabbit in its meaning as a symbol of love, fishing the reference from the epistolary of Vita Sackville West and Violet Trefusis, two lesbian writers in Edwardian England who, in their own letters, used the word "rabbit" to talk about their love. Ambush rabbits, on the other hand, were a reference to rave culture and the modern avatar craze and nostalgic video games of the 1990s. Finally, last January, it was Masayuki Ino of Doublet who had his own show opened by a model dressed as a pink rabbit-a mixture of the human and animal worlds meant to represent the concept of diversity, since all animals (there was also an orca, wolf, and panda costume) live in harmony in nature.