Words: Tish Weinstock
Date: 07.07.2025

Picture a witch – any witch. Now, tell me what she looks like. Is she old and haggard? Rancid to the point of grotesque? Or is she young and beautiful, her charm disarming even as it unsettles? Does she strike fear in your heart, or has she bewitched you entirely? Most likely, she is all of these things at once. Witches have always embodied contradiction: beauty and horror, wisdom and madness, nurture and destruction. They are the ultimate paradox: beings who defy binary definitions and exist in the liminal space between what we admire and what we fear. 

Karl Cauer’s Hexe (1874), a marble sculpture currently on display in Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie, captures this duality with eerie perfection. On first glance, we see the classic female nude, a demure seated figure in quiet contemplation. But all is not quite what it seems. Behind her, a pair of monstrous bat-like wings unfurl, while concealed amongst the coils of her hair, snakes lie ready to strike. Suddenly, our vision of feminine virtue is distorted into something far more complex. This is no passive muse, but rather a siren, an enchanted sorceress of both natural grace and supernatural menace. She is fearsome, fascinating, empowered, and enigmatic. 

Throughout history and across cultures, the witch has taken on myriad forms. The wise healer, the feared enchantress, the social and sexual deviant, the folkloric crone and green-skinned hag, the 1950s housewife with a dark secret, the sisters who slay demons, the revered feminist, the misfit teen. Misunderstood and maligned, she is power personified—and punished for it. 

Despite her various incarnations, one thing remains a constant: an unbridled female energy that cannot be contained - a quality that has acted as both a superpower and a curse. Indeed, this staunch refusal to fit the prescribed mould of how a woman should look and behave has seen our witch persecuted over the years. So threatening was her nonconformity that, from the 15th to the 18th century, women accused of witchcraft were literally put to death. 

But as attitudes towards women changed, so too has our cultural understanding of witches. No longer an outcast, the witch has been reclaimed as a symbol of power and resistance, one that in recent years has infiltrated culture at practically every level.

In the last year alone, the mark of the witch has cropped up everywhere from fashion and film to music and art. See it saunter down the runways at Dilara Findikoglu and Alexander McQueen; watch it reverberate on the big screen with films like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Wicked. Hear its cry in the haunted melodies of Doja Cat and Ethel Cain. Or in the hypnotic work of Grand High Art Witch Marina Abramovic. But nowhere is it more apparent than in the everyday spells of online communities like #Witchtok, where individuals turn to witchcraft as a way to shield themselves from an increasingly fractured world. 

In 2025, the witch has never been more powerful. It will come as no surprise, then, that she serves as a guiding light for this issue. Divided up into three chapters, here we meet the witch in three iterations. That of Maiden, the beguiling young temptress who has the power to lure and liberate; that of Mother, fearsome sorceress and fierce protector; and that of Crone, a figure so defiant that they occupy a world unto their own.

In a world that continues to police women’s bodies and threaten our power and autonomy, let this issue be a siren call to arms to celebrate women in all their monstrous glory. Welcome to the season of the witch.

The Pre-Fall ‘25 Collection launches on 10.07.2025