Marc C. Møllerskov has long mined dystopian subcultures for their capacity to reframe survival as style, yet POST MORT3M marked a shift from his earlier, more chaotic presentations toward something tighter in its narrative arc and more deliberate in its construction. Staged three kilometres below ground in a fictional club entered through industrial sewer piping, the collection both imagined a refuge from the surface and insisted that descent was a necessary condition for transformation.
FINE CHAOS has always excelled at world-building, and here the scenography felt less like a set than an excavation site where bodies and objects bore the same patina of endurance. Withered plants, twisted metal, and discarded personal relics lined the path to the runway, reinforcing the premise that nothing is without history and nothing is spared the forces of erosion. This visual language carried into the garments themselves, where oiled latex recalled condensation-beaded pipelines, knitwear was distressed with precision so the structure remained intact, and crushed fabrics suggested the memory of movement rather than a static fold.
There was a push-pull between the ceremonial and the degraded that gave the collection its tension: sharply tailored silhouettes in satins and structured wool carried the presence of a secular priesthood, while elsewhere the shapes slackened into the languor of bodies caught in repetitive, ritualised motion. The tension between grime and divinity is not new for FINE CHAOS, but here it felt more contained, less sprawling, as though the designer had found an exact aperture through which to let the two bleed together.
The Yu-Gi-Oh! references, from card-motif accessories to fragmented illustrations woven into the set, signalled a potential upcoming collaboration, but more importantly, they functioned as an intertextual layer rather than a marketing gimmick. By embedding pop-cultural nostalgia within a space coded for subcultural exclusivity, Møllerskov deepened the show’s commentary on collective memory and the ways communities form through shared signs, however obscure.
Crucially, the audience composition reinforced the brand’s positioning: over half the seats reserved for members of the FINE CHAOS Society, an online micro-community that blurs the boundaries between consumer, muse, and co-creator. In the fashion calendar’s relentless churn, this insistence on community as both subject and audience sets FINE CHAOS apart from other dystopia-minded labels that rely purely on spectacle.
If there is a critique to be made, it lies in the occasional over-reliance on surface treatments to carry thematic weight. The distressed finishes, while beautifully executed, risk becoming familiar if not periodically reinterpreted. Yet in POST MORT3M, they were balanced by a renewed clarity of silhouette and a restraint in palette that made the narrative legible without flattening its complexity.
In the end, POST MORT3M was not about death in the apocalyptic sense but about what survives the process of stripping away, and in its most successful moments, the collection suggested that survival, when framed through the rituals of dress and gathering, can be as much about beauty as it is about endurance.
Cody Rooney is the Editor in Chief and senior contributor at liminul.
He is a PhD candidate, digital content specialist, writer, editor, multi-media artist, and photographer.