September 2026
Dress Rehearsal
Culture is a living, breathing retrospect; a flesh-and-blood temperature check of the times. What we watch reflects the ideas already occupying our minds, while what we wear becomes a tangible expression of the concepts we hold dear. Given enough distance, those choices become artifacts of an era, preserving pieces of who we were and what mattered to us at the time.
With TIFF taking over Toronto, we found ourselves considering just how many facets of culture are captured on screen. We spoke with Sarah Runnalls and Louise Bruun about the alchemy of aesthetics, and its integral role in building character on screen. We looked in the rear-view at the festival debuts that became cinematic canon, then turned our attention to the stories preparing to meet their first audiences in theatres this month.
With Alexis Pharae, we found that same cultural exchange playing out in the real world. Her work within Vampyre culture occupies a fascinating space where ancient folklore becomes modern-day lived experience, shaped by people who found themselves reflected in the spirit of its community.
FW26 couture collections offer another perspective. Fashion is art made in real time, shaped by the culture surrounding it and destined to become part of the record we leave behind. The collections have us wondering what future fashion historians will see when they look back at this moment, particularly as dark feminine dressing grows increasingly assertive while beauty becomes stranger amid a renewed appetite for glamour.
We watch. We absorb. We interpret. And sometimes, without realizing it, we step into the picture ourselves.
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Cover: courtesy of Alexis Pharae shot by Ben Rekemeyer Photography
Culture
Cover Story: An Architect of Endless Night: Alexis Pharae, Steward of Old-World Decadence
When folklore becomes culture, somebody has to build the ballroom
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
In 2026, the concept of a grand ball seems like something borrowed from the pages of a storybook. We imagine gowns sweeping across polished floors beneath the glitter of chandeliers, every guest dressed magnificently for the occasion. An extravagance from another age, preserved in old novels and period films, but absent from modern day life.
And yet, once a year, such a night awaits those fortunate enough to cross the threshold of Endless Night New England.
Several hundred guests arrive having spent months preparing for the occasion. Corsets are laced. Fangs catch the low light. Music spills across a ballroom transformed so completely that, until morning, the outside world feels centuries away.
An initiated Vampyre Priestess and the co-producer of the iconic Endless Night New England Vampire Ball, Alexis Pharae spends much of the year creating the elaborate gatherings that bring this international subculture together. In Salem, she and business partner Benjamin Addam are also proprietors of Vampfangs, the storied and beloved Salem institution that has been fitting fangs since 1993, now serving a broader culture through fashion and events.
We has the pleasure of speaking with Pharae about finding her place within Vampire culture and the role she now plays in shaping its future.
Staying Close to the Magic: Inside the Creative World of Louise Bruun
The acclaimed Hair and Make-up Designer on trusting her instincts and remaining a student of her craft
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Louise Bruun was 19 when Nicolas Winding Refn asked her to work on his first feature, Pusher. She had never done it before, but agreed anyway, kicking off her creative career. One of the actors in her chair was another newcomer: Mads Mikkelsen.
Decades later, Bruun is still saying yes to the creative unknown. Only now, she brings a formidable career’s worth of experience with her.
Her work has moved between the immediacy of fashion and the permanence of film, teaching her to trust an instinct while continually sharpening it. On a major production, she keeps herself close to the lens, where creative decisions can evolve alongside the scene in “reel” time. When a project changes course, she changes with it. After decades spent creating extraordinary aesthetics, she still considers herself a student of her craft.
That willingness to adapt is central to Bruun’s process. She arrives with an informed point of view but remains open to what other artists bring to
Dressing the Part: Costume Designer Sarah Runnalls on Yaga and the Visual Language of Character
Inside the creative process behind Yaga in anticipation of its TIFF 2026 premiere
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Before Sarah Runnalls was dressing characters for the screen, she was raiding her parents’ linen closet. As a teenager, no bedsheet was safe. Runnalls would take whatever fabric she could get her hands on and turn it into something she could wear, eventually making pieces for friends and selling her creations to local boutiques. She already understood fashion as a form of storytelling: each morning offered another opportunity to decide how you wanted to present yourself to the world.
That instinct would eventually take her from fashion school to Vancouver Fashion Week, where her Sarah Runnalls Collection earned her an Emerging Designer Award. Her work with iconic Canadian drag queen Jimbo introduced another dimension to her designs, beginning with costumes for local theatre before their creative paths led into film and television.
Her latest project, Yaga, gave her particularly rich material to explore. Created by Kat Sandler, the series reimagines a folklore figure whose image has been shaped by centuries of storytelling. Rather than reaching for the familiar visual shorthand of the witch, Runnalls helped create modern women whose power and confidence are embedded in how they present themselves. The female gaze became an important creative guide, resulting in a visual identity that feels contemporary while leaving room for some cleverly placed cinematic references.
With Yaga premiering at TIFF 2026, we spoke with Runnalls about the creative process behind bringing its characters to life and the unexpected path that brought her from making one-of-a-kind fashion to designing entire identities for the screen.
Admit One: Gothic Guide to TIFF 2026
12 screenings and experiences to make the most of Toronto’s biggest celebration of cinema
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
For nearly two weeks each September, Toronto becomes one of the most exciting places in the world for cinephiles. TIFF may be famous for red carpets and awards-season premieres, but its programme reaches much further, bringing television to the big screen and experimental filmmaking into the conversation alongside horror that demands a midnight audience. Add live discussions with the people shaping what we watch next and a city that enthusiastically joins the party, and there are countless ways to experience the festival beyond chasing its biggest ticket.
To help you plan accordingly, we’ve curated a gothic guide to some of the festival’s most compelling dark storytelling, with a few appropriately cinematic ways to spend the hours between screenings.
From the Festival Archives: Where Iconic Dark Cinema Made Its Debut
20 films that left the festival circuit destined for cult status
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
There’s a special kind of thrill in seeing a band in a tiny venue before the rest of the world catches on. Film festivals offer cinephiles their own version of that feeling. Every year, audiences take their seats without knowing that the film about to begin could become a future classic—or that the actor on screen might be giving the performance everyone will soon be talking about. Looking back through festival history makes those first screenings even more fascinating.
These 20 films arrived on the circuit before finding a much larger audience and earning their place in the dark cinema canon.
Scene Stealers: 10 Underrated On-Screen Dark Feminine Badasses
The formidable actresses we should all be talking about
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
There is something compelling about watching an actress disappear into a character we’re not entirely sure we should root for. These are the disrupters: actresses willing to inhabit characters who are damaged without making them helpless; dangerous without stripping away their humanity. They find beauty inside ugly stories without sanding down the edges that made them uncomfortable in the first place.
Their work makes space for women to be contradictory and occasionally difficult to love—and infinitely more interesting because of it.
From established actresses whose range deserves greater recognition to emerging talent already pushing at the boundaries, these are 10 dark feminine badasses we cannot shut up about.
Screen to Speakers: 23 Goth-Coded Soundtracks Worth Turning Up
The alternative soundtracks that entered our playlists
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
The relationship between movies and music has given us some truly legendary listening. Few understood that relationship quite like Tim Curry, whose passing this year inspired us to revisit The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the songs that helped turn a strange little film into a cultural phenomenon. Fifty years later, audiences still know when to jump to the left.
In honour of Tim Curry and the enduring power of a perfectly curated soundtrack, we’re turning up 24 films and series whose music found a life beyond the screen. Some introduced us to new artists, while others made familiar songs impossible to hear the same way again. All earned a permanent place in our playlists.
Reel Keepers: Inside Toronto’s Revue Cinema
How Toronto's historic movie house is carrying film nostalgia into a new era of immersive cinema
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
There was a time when seeing a movie was a proper night on the town. You bought the ticket. Chose your seat. Sat among friends and strangers. The lights went down, and for the next two hours, everyone experienced the same thing at the same time.
Streaming has made film almost infinitely accessible, putting more than a century of cinema within reach from the comfort of our couch. But convenience changed our relationship with watching it. The destination disappeared. So did much of the anticipation, occasion and collective experience that once came with going to the movies.
At Toronto's Revue Cinema, those things are very much alive.
More than a century after audiences first began filing into the Roncesvalles theatre, the Revue has become a cinephile's paradise, with programming that stretches from cult oddities and filmmaker retrospectives to audience-participation screenings and Saturday mornings fuelled by classic cartoons and unlimited cereal.
The Revue isn't simply putting old movies back on the big screen. It's finding increasingly imaginative reasons for audiences to experience them together. Here, film history is something you participate in.
Top of the Class: Dark Academia on Screen
Where intellectual obsession meets a wardrobe worthy of study
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
September has a habit of making students of us all. As classrooms fill again and the leaves begin to turn, old academic daydreams begin their annual return too. There are books to be carried, corridors to disappear down and an entire wardrobe waiting for colder weather.
In the world of fashion, Dark Academia is often sharply defined by a predictable uniform of dark tweed and severe pleated skirts against a backdrop of antique libraries. Fair play. Thankfully, cinema offers a broader education, showcasing how the aesthetic can belong to the brilliant professor coming apart at the seams or the young writer determined to put something incendiary on the page. It can be romantic, decadent or dressed in candy colours designed to disarm you.
In the right hands, a sharply tailored suit can suggest a lifetime spent collecting knowledge—and deciding exactly what to do with it. The final cut proves just how far that visual language can travel, from Mary Shelley and The Imitation Game to the pastel vengeance of Do Revenge.
So, in the spirit of back-to-school season, we went back to film school. The syllabus spans centuries and several highly questionable educational environments, studying the characters who have given Dark Academia its many cinematic lives.
Class is in session.
Style
Dark Feminine Travel Guide: A Long Weekend in Toronto
Where to stay, wander and misbehave for three days in the city
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Toronto is so much more than Blue Jays games and Steam Whistle beneath the CN Tower. Look beyond the postcard version and you’ll find a city shaped by Gothic architecture, storied institutions and a creative culture that rewards a little curiosity.
For a long weekend worthy of your darker inclinations, we’ve curated a lux long weekend that sways between the city’s gothic heritage and its more decadent pleasures, making time for art, fashion and a few wonderfully strange discoveries along the way. Pack something black. You’re going to want options.
Choose Your Major: Three Ways to Wear Dark Academic Style
From Gothic Academic to Literary Rebel, consider your fall wardrobe enrolled
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Dark Academia may have its signatures, but there is no single uniform waiting at the library door. Follow the aesthetic across eras and characters and its familiar codes begin to shift, moving from the precision of collegiate dressing into historical romance before wandering into the beautifully eccentric territory of traditional menswear. We think of them as different courses of study within the same discipline, each offering its own visual vocabulary.
For fall, we’ve broken out three of our favourite approaches and translated their cinematic references into wardrobes made for real life. Wednesday brings the severity of Gothic Academic, Mary Shelley inspires the softer provocation of Literary Rebel, while Sherlock Holmes makes a compelling case for Eccentric Intellectual. Your own curriculum can follow wherever the semester takes you, from campus to the office and every extracurricular pursuit beyond it.
Drop Dead Gorgeous: 9 Iconic Gothic Beauty Looks from the Screen
The cinematic hair and makeup moments still haunting our beauty routines
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Smudge it. Sharpen it. Tease it sky-high. Some of cinema’s most memorable beauty looks reached far beyond the screen, awakening something in generations of spooky girls who finally saw a version of beautiful that felt like home.
For those of us who grew up surrounded by Baywatch bombshell perfection, trying on those versions of femininity could feel a little like playing dress-up in somebody else’s closet. Then we met Morticia Addams. Nancy Downs rimmed her eyes in black. Akasha appeared dripping in gold. Suddenly, beauty could be strange. It could be severe or even a little frightening, and still leave us completely mesmerized.
These characters gave us something to recognize ourselves in and, perhaps more importantly, something to experiment with. Their influence stepped out of the screen and landed directly in our vanity cases, where we smudged the liner darker and discovered just how good it felt when the reflection finally looked a little more like us.
These nine iconic looks helped set our spooky souls—and beauty routines—ablaze.
State of Dress: The Dark Feminine FW26 Runway Report
A soft goth study of the season’s most compelling styles
By: Amanda Albert
The FW26 couture collections began making their way down international runways in the spring, offering an early look at what designers imagined for a season that felt distant at the time. Now, as summer starts relinquishing its sweaty hold and fall clothes make their eagerly anticipated annual migration back to the front of the closet, those ideas hit much closer to home.
With fall approaching, our interest in the season’s runway shifts from admiration to application. The collections have had time to settle in our minds, and the prospect of actually dressing for cooler weather gives us reason to revisit the details that caught our attention the first time around. Some will inspire the pieces we pull from storage; others may earn a place on the fall shopping list.
Across the season, designers found extraordinary range in familiar dark feminine signatures, experimenting with transparency and exaggerated proportion while giving accessories an increasingly important role in shaping the silhouette.
Below, we’ve streamlined our FW26 trend report into ten key categories, returning to the collections and creative choices we’re still thinking about just as fall finally gives us somewhere to wear them.
Walk This Way: How to Wear FW26’s Dark Feminine Runway Trends
Six of this season’s soft goth styles making the leap from catwalk to closet
By: Amanda Albert
The first signs of fall arrive almost imperceptibly; the light changes, the evening carries a chill and suddenly the leather jacket you have been eyeing all summer no longer feels wildly premature. For those of us who spend July and August yearning for soft leather and decadent knits, mentally negotiating how soon is too soon for fur, our season has finally arrived.
The runway is where the brightest minds in fashion set their imaginations loose at full scale; the real fun for the rest of us begins when whispers of those creative provocations start seeping into our wardrobes. For FW26, designers gave us plenty of inspiration.
Better still, much of it requires surprisingly few additions to what we already own. A strategic flash of sheer can change the complexion of an all-black ensemble, while extravagant texture gives familiar silhouettes fresh dimension. Patterned tights introduce print without asking us to abandon our beloved black palette; an imposing pair of sunglasses can shift the attitude of everything beneath them.
That is where couture fantasy meets practiced street style. We’re drawing inspiration from the ideas that had us spellbound as they came down the runway, translating them for mornings when there is somewhere to be, a temperature to contend with and absolutely no runway waiting at our feet.
This fall, a few calculated tweaks are all it takes. Here are six FW26 ideas we’ll be putting into practice, bringing a little of the artistry that thrilled us on the runway into the lives we dress for every day.