Simulacra in Silk: Haraway’s Cyborg, Performative “Femininity”, and the Aesthetics of the Automaton on the Margiela Runway

This article reimagines the representation of “female” robots through the lens of fashion, exploring how the female-coded machine moves from fantasy object to theoretical agent. Anchoring the discussion in the Maison Margiela Artisanal 2024 show by John Galliano, where models emerged as porcelain-faced, sculpturally swathed automatons, it argues that fashion can be a powerful site for re-performing gender and identity. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism, Judith Butler’s gender performativity, and Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, the article reinterprets iconic robotic figures from Metropolis, Blade Runner, and The Stepford Wives in comparative dialogue with Galliano’s live fashion theater. Rather than depicting women as programmable objects of desire, Galliano’s show performs gender as glitched: looped, over-coded, and unraveling. The garments mimic corrugated paper, retro silhouettes, and abraded lace, exposing the costume of femininity as artifice. The Margiela cyborgs walk not to seduce but to disturb, spectral remnants of a gender system collapsing under the weight of its own signs. Ultimately, this article proposes that the runway, like the screen, is a hyperreal stage for resisting visual regimes of conformity, and that the cyborg, far from being futuristic, is already here, dressed in porcelain and theatrical distortion, and moving (staggering) deliberately off-script.