Casey Cadwallader

Casey Cadwallader is an American designer who spent just over seven years remaking Mugler around a single idea: that a garment should flatter the body wearing it rather than the other way round. He was appointed creative director in December 2017 and stepped down on 25 March 2025, when the house confirmed Miguel Castro Freitas as his successor. (FashionNetwork; Harper's Bazaar; Dazed)

Under Cadwallader, Mugler's cutout bodysuits, spiral-cut denim and camera-driven runway films became one of the more consistently referenced silhouettes in contemporary fashion, worn on stage and on red carpets by Beyoncé, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion. His own account of the job was less about spectacle than about tailoring: clothes engineered to fit a moving body rather than force it into a fixed shape. As of September 2026, no new position for him has been publicly announced. (Hollywood Reporter; Love to All Project)

New Hampshire to the drafting table

Cadwallader grew up in a small town in rural New Hampshire and attended the local public high school, where he was bullied for being gay and spent much of his adolescence hiding his interests to avoid drawing attention. Transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy for the rest of his schooling gave him, in his own words, "a clean slate": he began dressing more boldly, dyed his hair, and took a semester abroad in Japan that widened his sense of what a life in design could look like beyond New Hampshire. (Love to All Project)

He went on to study architecture at Cornell University, drawn to the discipline's engineering of curves and its treatment of the body as one layer among several — skin, clothing, furniture, building — that all negotiate the same physical space. A friend from his architecture cohort landed an internship at Marc Jacobs; Cadwallader, having petitioned his way into Cornell's apparel design courses on the side, followed him in and was invited back the next summer. He credits the choice between finishing as an architect — "a CAD slave for ten years" — and following fashion's faster, more itinerant path as the deciding factor in his change of direction. His first professional design job was nonetheless still architectural: with Gluckman Mayner Architects, working on new retail stores for Versace. (Glamcult; Harvard Design Magazine)

Three apprenticeships in a house's voice

Cadwallader spent close to two decades as a womenswear designer before he ran a house of his own. In New York, at Narciso Rodriguez, he held the title of creative director for ready-to-wear and accessories, working inside a label he later described as "very architectural, very sophisticated, very chic." A period at Loewe followed, then a move to Stockholm, where at Acne Studios he was responsible for designing the women's pre-collections in an environment he characterised as "very young, very cool, very fresh." Each house, he has said, pushed him to develop a different set of technical and tonal skills — denim, eveningwear, casualwear for a younger customer — that he carried with him rather than discarding when he moved on. (FashionNetwork; Love to All Project)

Rebuilding Mugler's silhouette

Mugler had already been through two creative directors since its founder, Manfred Thierry Mugler, stepped back from fashion in 2002: Nicola Formichetti, whose tenure Cadwallader later described as built around Lady Gaga and "sensational pop culture," and David Koma, who left at the end of 2017 to focus on his own label. Cadwallader, the fifth designer to hold the role, started on 1 December 2017 and premiered with the Autumn/Winter 2018-19 collection, after Mugler's president at the time, Sandrine Groslier, said he had been chosen "for his contemporary vision of the brand." (Hollywood Reporter; FashionNetwork; Vogue)

He described the house's core silhouette as "a big shoulder, a nipped waist and a curvy hip" and built each season as a variation on it. His most consistent technical signature was the skin-tight bodysuit, panelled in nylon and cut with negative-space openings rather than solid fabric, so the garment reveals as much of the body's own shape as it covers. He applied a related idea to denim from his debut collection onward: jackets and jeans cut on a spiral rather than joined at a conventional side seam, so the fabric wraps continuously around the leg or torso instead of meeting at a straight vertical join. The effect, on both the bodysuits and the denim, is clothing engineered to move with the wearer rather than restrain her — a departure from the more sculptural, upholstered look of Mugler's early-1990s archive. (The Zoe Report; Vogue)

Filming the body during lockdown

When runway shows became impossible in 2020, Cadwallader replaced them with short films made with DIS magazine and directors David Toro and Solomon Chase. The clearest statement of intent among them was the Spring Summer 2021 Part 02 film, released on the International Transgender Day of Visibility in spring 2021 and shot with a camera rig that could move, slow and accelerate in ways a live runway walk cannot. Its cast included the model Alek Wek, the actress and model Hunter Schafer, the model Irina Shayk, and the actress Dominique Jackson, a trans woman whose casting made the day's significance explicit rather than incidental. Cadwallader has said a runway walk "makes them into a bit of a robot — a robot that makes clothes move and that looks pretty," and that film let him escape that restriction. (Harvard Design Magazine)

That casting practice was consistent with what he had already said about his design process: that stretch fabrics and adaptable construction exist so a customer never has to feel her body is wrong for the dress. "I hate the idea that people put clothes on and feel bad about themselves," he said, describing his preference for offering a range of silhouettes over dictating a single ideal figure. He has also spoken directly about how his own experience as a gay man — including the years he spent hiding it before Phillips Exeter — shaped that instinct toward openness in casting and gender expression. (Love to All Project)

From the runway to the red carpet

Mugler's visibility under Cadwallader grew fastest through music. Beyoncé wore a custom design with an integrated metal bustier, referencing one of Thierry Mugler's archival "robot" looks, in promotion for her 2022 album Renaissance; Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and Dua Lipa all wore custom performance pieces during the same period, and Cadwallader also designed one of the dresses worn by the actress Chloë Sevigny at her 2022 wedding. (Hollywood Reporter)

The house scaled commercially alongside that visibility: WWD reported double- and triple-digit growth from 2020 onward and around 150 retail partners by 2023. A 2023 collaboration with H&M — a full runway show, concert and launch series built around a single capsule collection — sold out within a day, according to Mugler's managing director at the time, Adrian Corsin. The same year, Cadwallader was the driving force behind Inside the Dream, a documentary made for the house's 50th anniversary that intercut its archive with the run-up to the Spring 2024 show. That collection also marked Mugler's return to the official Paris Fashion Week calendar, with a cast that included Angela Bassett, Paris Hilton and Fan Bingbing alongside veteran runway models, as part of a broader push to move the brand to four collections a year. (WWD)

By the time Mugler was absent from the provisional Paris Fashion Week calendar for March 2025, industry reporting had already identified Cadwallader's departure as likely. The house confirmed it on 25 March 2025, over what both sides described as an amicable split: Mugler's leadership wished him well "in his next ventures," and Cadwallader said the house was "like no other" and that it had been "exciting to lean into all that it could mean in today's culture." What he does next has not been disclosed. (WWD; Dazed; The Zoe Report)

Reading the Cadwallader-era codes

Because Cadwallader was Mugler's sole creative director throughout his tenure, dating a garment to his years in charge is more straightforward than at houses that split the role. Anything shown from the Autumn/Winter 2018-19 collection onward, through his final looks in early 2025, is his. Everything before that belongs either to David Koma (2013–2017), Nicola Formichetti's earlier tenure, or to Manfred Thierry Mugler's own design years, which ended when he stepped back from ready-to-wear in 2002. (FashionNetwork)

The harder edge case sits at the boundary with his successor. Miguel Castro Freitas took over on 1 April 2025 and showed his first Mugler collection for Spring/Summer 2026, so pieces that reached stores after Cadwallader's March 2025 exit but before that debut are still, by season, his design — a reminder that a resale date and a design date are not the same fact. (The Zoe Report) In the clothes themselves, the clearest tells of his authorship remain the ones he built the house around: nylon-panelled bodysuits with negative-space cutouts rather than solid coverage, and denim or jersey cut on a spiral seam that wraps the body instead of meeting in a straight vertical line at the hip.

References

• Dominique Muret (trans. Nicola Mira). "Mugler appoints Casey Cadwallader as new Creative Director." FashionNetwork, 5 December 2017.
• Mark Holgate. "Casey Cadwallader, the New Man at Mugler, Talks About Taking On the Legendary French Label." Vogue, 9 May 2018.
• Grace Powell. "The NIGHT Issue with MUGLER." Glamcult.
• Mai Ly Hagan. "Casey Cadwallader on His Creative Vision for Mugler." Love to All Project, 2020.
• Sean Canty (interviewer). "Total Vision." Harvard Design Magazine, Issue 51: Multihyphenate.
• Laurie Brookins. "THR Fall Style: Mugler's Creative Director on Inspired Designs for Beyoncé's 'Renaissance'." The Hollywood Reporter, 18 September 2022.
• Lily Templeton. "Mugler and Artistic Director Casey Cadwallader to Part Ways: Sources." WWD, 5 February 2025.
• Dazed. "Mugler has a new creative director."
• The Zoe Report. "The Rumors Are True: Casey Cadwallader Is Leaving Mugler & His Successor Is Already Confirmed."
• Harper's Bazaar. "Casey Cadwallader Dressed the Best in Mugler—from Bella Hadid to Beyoncé." 25 March 2025.