The Feminine Urge To Dress Like An Alien

Elle Fanning is covered in green body paint, clad in a silver bullet bra and platform boots, karate-chopping and robot-walking and shaking her ass. This is Apple TV+’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles, and Fanning is in character as the titular Margo; Margo, in turn, is in character as Hungry Ghost, OnlyFans alter ego. Who’s Hungry Ghost? A sexy alien. Duh.

Strange? These days, not so much. Open Instagram and you might come across hot ETs advertising indie brands like Beepy Bella or Naomi Gilon, or music groups like XG playing in outer space. Meanwhile, in the high fashion world, aliens, UFOs, and the cosmos have been approaching escape velocity, from Thom Browne’s SS26 show to Matthieu Blazy’s cosmic set design and accessories for Chanel SS 26, to Florentina Leitner’s FW25 narrative about a group of cheerleaders getting abducted to Myah Hasbany’s UFO crash-inspired designs. Consider, too, the buggy sunglasses at Balenciaga SS26, some of the prosthetics at Matieres Fécales FW26, and all of the prosthetics at Walter van Beirendonck FW25. And that’s just in the style realm, to say nothing of the myriad books, movies, and more to tackle the subject in recent years—or the fact that Grimes is back. (Do what you will with that last one.)

On some level, it’s no mystery why we’ve got aliens on the brain. For years, Congress has been holding hearings about UFOs/UAPs; at the same time, the nerds in Silicon Valley have been trying to bring their own alien intelligence into the world. (Prayers up that AGI comes in peace.) And women have long been associated with aliens—often, sexy ones. Twentieth-century sci-fi was replete with “green-skinned space babes,” an archetype that appeared frequently enough to earn a nickname; less hot aliens were often used to explore anxieties around sex, sexual violence, and reproduction (looking at you, Alien). It’s dribbled over into the fashion realm, too: Recall the glittering space invaders of Gucci’s FW17 campaign, the Star Trek-coded makeup of Alexander McQueen’s SS10 show, the retro-glam aliens of Moschino’s FW18 runway, and the costumes Jean Paul Gaultier designed for The Fifth Element—including the looks for Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), who partly inspired Margo’s Hungry Ghost persona, and totally inspired many a celebrity’s Halloween costume.

But there’s something else in the air lately, and it’s sending this phenomenon into hyperdrive. Maybe it’s the mainstreaming of cosplay, which paved the way for women performers to inhabit outlandish, nonhuman personae, à la horsegiirL. Maybe it’s that the pendulum has swung back to artificiality, after we spent a decade-plus worshipping at the altar of authenticity, pursuing a false sense of intimacy through social media. Maybe it’s a reflection of how estranged we feel from our bodies and sexuality in a digitally-mediated world. Maybe girls just want to have fun (in space).

In the case of Margo’s Got Money Troubles, it was all of the above. Rufi Thorpe, the author of the novel on which the show is based, says the novel is “a love letter to artificiality” in all its forms, from wrestling to sex work to cosplay. Thorpe hit on the ET angle after realizing that, as the mother of a newborn, forced to drop out of school and stuck inside nursing, Margo already had “that feeling of being in outer space, separated from humanity in some way.” It was an easy jump from alienated to alien.

But, Thorpe points out, women don’t need to be caring for a baby to feel alienated. “Women become more aware of the performed quality of gender more consciously than men,” she says. “They’re always aware of the way that their being in the world is constructed.”

It’s true: From a young age, women are socialized to calibrate themselves to ensure others’ comfort, to layer on clothing and makeup to make themselves presentable — like slipping on a skin suit in the morning, so as to blend in with the planet’s native population. A distance grows between what others see and what’s inside.

To make this point, academics will cite John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself”), or Andrea Long Chu’s Females (“the self is hollowed out, made into an incubator for an alien force”). But SZA said it just as well, when asked about her alien-like bug prosthetics on Hot Ones in 2024: “Being a person is so daunting, as is being in your own skin … I’m just tired of being not a bug."

It’s freeing, to be something else. Doubly so, in the realm of sexuality; to really get freaky, you’ve got to embrace your inner freak.