Where Imagination Wanders: A Window to the Workbench of The Moon's Alibi
How designer Emma Rose transforms her innermost experiences into extraordinary works of wearable art
By: Amanda Albert
There is a profound sincerity to the way Emma Rose speaks about her art. The designer of The Moon's Alibi approaches her work with the curiosity of someone still discovering what she's capable of, and a reverence for the creative minds who have helped shape her ambitions. David Bowie's philosophy of pushing beyond one's comfort zone has become something of a guiding principle, while Alexander McQueen's deeply personal approach to design remains a source of admiration.
That philosophy has been a guiding light for Rose, illuminating the path to what has become a defining year in her creative journey. In 2026, she debuted her first runway collection, the culmination of more than a year's work in the studio and a dream she'd held since childhood. She also found herself confronting an unfortunate reality of independent design, speaking candidly about the emotional toll of design theft by a fast-fashion brand. Both experiences reveal an artist deeply invested in the integrity of what she creates.
Yet, perhaps the most compelling part of Rose's story is how intimately her creative evolution is connected to her own. Each new piece demands something of her technically and offers an opportunity to understand herself more fully. As she continues to explore what her art can become, the ambition remains personal: to keep challenging herself, honour the work and see just how far she can go.
We had the pleasure of sitting down with Emma to explore the story behind The Moon’s Alibi, and how her pursuit of creative excellence continues to shape her journey as an independent designer.
Dead Serious Dress Code: The Gothic Activewear Directory
13 alternative fitness brands and collections for lifting, lunging, stretching and sweating
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
We go to the gym to feel our best, so, what we wear should help us feel like ourselves, too. From yoga and pilates to the weight rack, spin, barre and boxing, there's no reason to leave your personal style in the locker room.
We've rounded up our favourite gothic and alternative activewear brands and collections, featuring everything from romantic, lace-trimmed sets to death metal-inspired gym gear.
Designed with performance in mind and plenty of personality to match, these pieces are ready to work as hard as you do.
Of Moss & Malice: An Autumn Bog Witch Style Guide
Folklore-inspired fashion for wandering woods and weathering the cold
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Every village has a story about a mysterious woman who lives beyond its borders.
She inhabits the cottage at the edge of the woods, where the trees grow crooked and the ground never quite dries. Some say she can cure an illness. Others insist she caused it. Children are warned against wandering too close, though nobody can agree on what happens to those who do…
Meet the Bog Witch.
Inspired by the fearsome women of European folklore, from Baba Yaga's forest dwelling to the Puritan nightmares of VVitch, this darker interpretation of woodland dressing borrows from the wardrobes of women who lived and worked close to the land. Coarse linen, heavy wool, weathered leather and layers built to withstand the elements form the foundation, accompanied by the colours of peat, moss, stagnant water and decaying vegetation.
For late autumn, the Bog Witch emerges in substantial cloaks, long skirts, knitted hoods and boots made for difficult terrain. Her clothing carries the marks of practical use, with a few peculiar embellishments suggesting that the stories told about her might contain a grain of truth.
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 it, allowing the project to take shape through collaboration.
Her latest film with Refn, Her Private Hell, offers a spectacular canvas for that philosophy. The film draws Bruun back into the horror that first captivated her as a teenager, now with a wealth of experience across fashion and film to draw from.
We spoke with Bruun about trusting her creative instincts and the creative possibilities that emerge when artists inspire one another.
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.
It was there that clothing took on a different responsibility. A beautiful garment became representative of a character’s history and storyline, revealing a world of information before a line of dialogue is uttered. Runnalls became fascinated by the precision of that process and the way a character could evolve visually from scene to scene.
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.
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.
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.
From Spark to Studio: Mary & Shelley's Deadstock Design Philosophy
Lindsay and Natalie revisit the years between an ambitious idea and the independent leather goods label they imagined all along
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Great ideas have a funny way of torturing their creator until they are fully animated.
The first spark behind Mary & Shelley appeared years before the brand itself. Long before the leather guitar bags and deadstock materials, there were two alt fashion students with a shared passion in horror and music, and ambitious to pursue design. The concept lingered, bubbling beneath the surface, through corporate careers and years spent learning the realities of an industry they would one day disrupt. Rather than rushing to build something before they understood it, they allowed the idea to evolve alongside them.
For impatient individuals (present company included) immersed in a hurry-up culture; this method can feel tortuous. Yet Mary & Shelley is a reminder that some of our best ideas need time to mature like a well-cellared vintage, developing depth and character before they're finally uncorked.
Ahead, founders Lindsay and Natalie revisit the origins of Mary & Shelley, unpacking the realities of building an independent fashion brand and sharing why patience became one of their greatest creative assets.
Practical Magic Returns: Your Witchy Style Guide
Channel Sally, Gillian or the Aunts ahead of the long-awaited sequel
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
With Practical Magic 2 arriving in theatres this September, the spell has been thoroughly renewed. We found ourselves returning to the nostalgia of original film and the wardrobes that made its magic feel so lived in.
At its heart, Practical Magic is a story about women choosing one another. The Owens women survive because they combine their strength; their power grows through sisterhood.
In anticipation of their return, we created three fashion capsules for finding your place in the Owens family. Sally offers witchy daywear built for real life. Gillian takes that magic out after dark. The Aunts dress for midnight margaritas with absolutely no concern for the calendar.
Whichever closet calls to you, wear it in the spirit of the Owens women: entirely yourself and surrounded by women who make you stronger.
Crowd Control: 13 Spiked Purses to Preserve Your Personal Space
Sharp accessories for anyone who prefers admiration from a distance
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
If you don’t like being herded like cattle in big crowds, we sure have the bag for you.
The subway doors slide open and everyone presses in at once. A stranger’s breath warms the side of your face. Someone’s shoulder drives into your back as the car lurches forward. By the time you reach your stop, your shoes are scuffed and every nerve in your body is begging for six unoccupied inches. The elevator is no better. It is a cramped little nightmare with fluorescent lighting and no socially acceptable escape route.
What if you could carry your own personal bubble? Imagine a portable perimeter that buys you enough literal breathing room to arrive with your patience intact. Enter: the Personal Space Bag.
When Mars (@yung.planet), one of our favourite alternative creators, shared her New York Fashion Week story, we were furious on her behalf. We also recognized the feeling immediately. So, we assembled the accessories equivalent of a wrought-iron fence: 13 spiked bags designed to look beautiful from a respectful distance.
(K)night Moves: Dark Medieval Dressing for the Modern Wardrobe
Where battlefield dressing meets everyday armour
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Beneath every fairytale is a story about survival. If medieval style calls to you, perhaps it’s because there is a survivor in your bloodline? Someone that crossed an ocean. Survived a plague. Returned from a war.
These silhouettes and symbols call back to a hard-won victory, at a time when we could all use a win.
This darker interpretation of medieval dressing draws from that not-so-distant history, favouring pieces feel like homage to brave knights and the community they served, acknowledging what has come before and carrying forward its aesthetic of protection.
The Unmentionables: 13 Dark Feminine Lingerie Brands to Shop for National Underwear Day
Whether you're building your first collection or refreshing an old favourite, these beautifully crafted brands belong beneath every wardrobe
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Intimates are aptly named. They're the pieces we wear closest, often for our eyes only.
They're the garments we choose for ourselves first, not because anyone else will see them, but because of how they make us feel. Whether your confidence comes wrapped in delicate lace or your favourite cotton essentials, the right pair becomes the underpinning of the day ahead.
In celebration of National Underwear Day (August 5), we've rounded up 13 dark feminine lingerie brands that make the first layer every bit as considered as the last.
Nightshade: Goth-Coded Style Guide to Haunt Your Local Market
Everything you need to build the perfect market-day ensemble
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
There are few better ways to spend a summer morning than wandering a local farmers market with an iced coffee in one hand and a basket in the other.
Market mornings invite you to slow your pace and enjoy what's in front of you. We like to arrive dressed for the occasion, adapting storm cloud styling to even the sunniest days.
Forbidden Fruit: Dark Cherry, Plum & Blackberry Dark Feminine Fashion
From black cherry to midnight blue, these sumptuous shades are ripe for the picking
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Summer has a way of making everything look a little more appetizing. Cherries ripen. Blackberries stain your fingertips. Plums practically glow in the afternoon sun. It's only natural that our wardrobes would follow suit. These are the rich, fruit-inspired shades we're reaching for all season long.
The Dark Feminine Lipstick Cellar: Body, Balance & Finish
From everyday vintages to rare bottles, discover the lip products worthy of a permanent place in your collection
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Much like a well-stocked wine cellar, the best lipstick collections evolve over time, each addition carefully chosen for its unique formula, finish and where you'll wear it.
Some become everyday staples, others are reserved for special occasions and a select few are simply too beautiful not to own. From luxury icons to affordable favourites, these are the products that have earned a permanent place in our rotation.
Laced Up: 18 Iconic Corsets from Film & Television
From Scarlett O'Hara to Xena, these are the underpinnings that stepped beyond the screen and into fashion history
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Few garments have worked harder in film than the humble corset.
For more than a century, costume designers have used it to communicate everything from power and ambition to romance, rebellion and utter ruin. A single tightening lace can signal the expectations placed upon a young woman. A structured bodice can transform a queen into a monarch of the ages, a vampire into a legend or a showgirl into an icon. Long before a character speaks, the corset often tells us exactly who they are.
Some became inseparable from the stories themselves. Scarlett O'Hara's lacing scene in Gone with the Wind remains one of the most famous moments in Hollywood history while Satine's ruby corset came to define an entire era of fashion when donned by Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge.
From gothic heroines and doomed aristocrats to pirates, vampires and queens, these are a few of our favourites.
The Gothic Beauty Arsenal: The Products We Keep Close
A collection of everyday essentials curated with care
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
There comes a point in every makeup journey where the experimentation slows down.
The drawer full of impulse purchases remains, of course, but a smaller collection begins to emerge; the products that consistently make you feel like yourself. The foundation repurchased before it runs out. The eyeliner that never lets you down. The lipstick that somehow ends up in every purse, coat pocket and desk drawer. These are ours favourites to achieve an everyday soft goth look.
Dressed for Downpour: Dark Feminine Rain Gear Designed for Stormy Weather
Patent trench coats, cathedral umbrellas and storm boots prove that bad weather has never stood in the way of style for the darkly inclined
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
The sky has been grey since breakfast as rainwater slides down storefront windows while someone in an office tower quietly regrets wearing suede. Sidewalks shine like wet pavement in a classic film noir. Most would agree it’s positively miserable outside. How delightful. It’s finally time to wear the good coat ;).
From patent trenches to skull-handled umbrellas and studded rain boots built to weather the storm, these pieces make a rain day something to look forward to.