Entering Dracula’s Lair at Pipenco FW25

Each design challenges harmony, combining Gothic and Romanian styles.

Photography by Krischan Singh

Lorena Pipenco always saw Dracula as more than a story about a villain but a man who put a spotlight on the women in his wake. She saw these women as powerful, reclaiming, and transcendent—overbearing the mere shadow that is Dracula.

This season’s collection also features inspiration from Interview With the Vampire, a powerful and romantic woman who becomes immortal. Each design challenges harmony, combining Gothic and Romanian styles with avant-garde balloon dresses, Victorian collars, large top hats, and a red and black color story.

We see details of distressed knits, peplum tops and dresses, balloon sleeves, gloves, lace, fuzz, drapery, feathers, and crystals to add a sense of opulence, movement, and transcendence in each piece.

Photography by Krischan Singh

Pipenco also pays homage to Bram Stoker’s dark romanticism and Romanian painter Corneliu Baba. The melodramatic show, with its eerily haunting music, confronts devotion, autonomy, and resilience. FW25 embraces change and transformation through the new use of silhouettes and textures in the Pipenco brand.

The models did more than strut down the Lower East Side’s Back Room; they theatrically towered over the runway in The East Village Shoe Repair’s Zubos line. Broken clocks, blooming roses, and branches stemming from the platform shoes evoke a forgotten past from unforgotten women.