Skull prints back on the McQueen runway is a recession indicator

If you’ve spent enough time online recently, you’ll know that practically anything is now a recession indicator. The cultural obsession with officewear? Recession indicator. New Calvin Harris music? Recession indicator. Zooey Deschanel wearing a Bumpit to the 2025 SAG Awards? Recession indicator. But with so many supposed signifiers of financial ruin floating down our timelines, you’d be forgiven for missing the one very real recession indicator glaring firmly back at us: the return of the Alexander McQueen skull scarf. 

Originally debuted at McQueen’s SS03 Irere show, the skull print reached peak popularity at the end of that decade, just as the world’s financial systems had begun to crumble. Buoyed by a legion of late 00s It-girls, the scarf became synonymous with stars like Nicole Richie and the Olsen twins, but also a gaggle of semi-famous tabloid mainstays whose names you could never quite remember.

Now, at Paris Fashion Week’s AW25 edition, current McQueen creative director Seán McGirr has boldly brought back the skull, with the ubiquitous scarf sweeping the runway as it dangled from bags, and was even fashioned into a sheer blouse if you wish to pledge your allegiance to the 2010s with your chest. But Dazed, how is a £300 scarf a signifier of financial strife, I hear you ask? Well, it’s quite simple actually: as fiscal catastrophe looms large, canny fashion people are looking to shore up their portfolios by investing in liquid assets whose market value won’t depreciate over time, such as the iconic McQueen skull print. Plus the scarf was popular during the last recession, so it’s actually basic economics.

While McQueen never officially phased out the scarf (you could still buy a brand new one throughout Sarah Burton’s tenure) they fell out of favour during the early 2010s, so this runway moment feels like a proper re-embracing of the print by McGirr and the house. As the gaudy, McBling style of Y2K goes boom and bust once more, and “indie sleaze” is firmly on the way out, the fashion world has frantically been searching for styles to replace those over the last couple of years, and the good people at McQueen are well aware of that (as is Timothée Chalamet, who recently rocked the skull scarf back in January). And while numerous fashion publications have declared the scarf to be “back” no less than one million times since the pandemic, this actual catwalk co-sign from the house is sure to get things properly moving.

As well as this, the return of the skull print neatly follows a burgeoning obsession for 00s-era imagery. With Louis Vuitton re-upping its Takashi Murakami collab, Dior reintroducing John Galliano’s ‘J’adore Dior’ slogan on the AW25 runway, Balenciaga dropping a City bag campaign of digitally altered 2000s paparazzi photos, plus a never-ending carousel of archive red carpet moments, we seem to be existing inside a fashion nostalgia feedback loop, and it’s not stopping anytime soon. Maybe it really is a recession!

But back on the Paris runway, Credit Crunch-core wasn’t the only thing that McGirr was serving last night. Inspired by Victorian-era dandies, the designer went on to fashion his own “neo-dandy” for 2025, kicking off proceedings with a section of all-black tailored coats, before transitioning into diaphanous pastel dresses, ruff-collared faux fur jackets and statement sleeve silk blouses. “To me, dandyism is the ultimate act of adornment; deeply personal, playful and transgressive,” the Irish designer said in a statement. “It raises questions of character and identity, idealism and gender. I wanted to explore the enduring relevance of the dandy’s radical spirit in our modern world.”

Scroll through the gallery above to see the entire AW25 collection.