Every time Mickey Mouse was spotted on the catwalk Celebrating 100 years of Disney by remembering the best fashion cameos

A pair of ears that the Times described as «one of the greatest icons of the 20th and 21st centuries», eight fingers clad in off-white gloves as opposed to a pitch-black silhouette, and a hyper-pop verve conceived one night in the Laugh-O-Gram Studio: we are talking about Mickey Mouse. His creator, Walt Disney, introduced him in 1928 for the short film Steamboat Willie drawing inspiration from a real-life mouse - «I became particularly fond of a brown pet mouse. He was a shy little fellow. By touching him on the nose with a pencil, I trained him to run inside a black circle that I had drawn on my table,» Walt Disney himself recounted. When he first spoke, in the short film The Karnival Kid, Mickey Mouse pronounced a telegraphic 'Hot Dogs', which struck a chord with children all over the world - ice cream cones, watches, slippers and underwear began clamouring for Mickey's image. Despite taking his first steps in an economic scenario marked by the Wall Street crash, Mickey Mouse established an instantly profitable relationship with the world of fashion, which is still reflected in new collaborations. From the end of 2023, Disney, despite having managed to extend the expiry of exclusive rights on Mickey Mouse twice, will no longer be able to do so on the Mickey Mouse version Steamboat Willie (1927) while preserving the copyright on later versions

Let's take a look back at Mickey Mouse's legacy in the world of fashion: streetwear, slogans, naïve attitude and punk deviations.

The Mickey Mouse hat 

After the presentation of the biographical film Walt before Disney in 2015, inspired by Timothy Susanin's book, and with the celebration of Mickey Mouse's 90th birthday in 2018, fashion has continued to reshape the contours of an intergenerational icon: collaborations with Supreme, Zara, Moschino [tv] H&M, Gap, Kith or Tommy Hilfiger's college jacket are just some of the examples of how those red shorts with two buttons and yellow over shoes have been taken and divided between ready-to-wear and fast fashion. But it was perhaps Alessandro Michele's work at Gucci that brought out the best in the Mickey Mouse character, taking his head and turning it into a bag on the catwalk of the SS19 show. Only a year later, to coincide with the Year of the Chinese Mouse, Gucci collaborated with Disney by combining the Florentine fashion house's monogram with Mickey Mouse's face. Even John Galliano, starting from the reflections explored by Maison Margiela Couture, goes as far as to enlist Mickey Mouse in the Co-Ed 2023 fashion show by printing his image on T-shirts in a minefield of fishnet leggings, ruby red Tabi stiletto heels, chiffon-covered flannel shirts and punk brooches. It is worth remembering that «it all started with a dream and a mouse», a mouse whose innocent appearance encapsulates an unexpectedly cynical and realistic message: «You might not realise it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth might be the best thing in the world for you,» Walt Disney said. And fashion realised this long ago.