A couple of days ago I was in Borders in Glasgow's Buchanan Street, exploring their usually poorly stocked "Fashion" shelves, when I came across the catalogue of the Met Museum exhibition "Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy".
The volume looks absolutely stunning (at £30 it's the least it can do...), with a thick metal cover (hardcover version) and glossy laminated pages portraying models wearing comics inspired outfits. The texts include the essay “Secret Skin: An Essay in Unitard Theory” by Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, that sounds rather interesting. Yet, in someway, you can’t stop feeling that the people behind the event tried to read a bit too much into comics, desperately looking for that symbolic or metaphorical association between fashion and powerful superheroes. 
The connection between fashion and comics is not new. In the late 60s, Italian weekly Panorama published a feature that claimed comics were a fashionable trend among Italian teenagers. The article also analysed the preferences of young Italian men and women poster-wise. Comic book heroes and anti-heroes – among them Spider-man, Batman and Mandrake the Magician – were top of the list, followed by Wes Wilson and Stanley Mouse’s psychedelic images and anonymous political posters featuring slogans from the Bolshevik Revolution or pop art-like portraits of Mao with red stars in his eyes.
It was around the same time that Italian fashion critic Anna Piaggi published on the same magazine an article entitled “Una moglie pipistrello per le notti d’estate” (A bat wife for the summer nights) in which she wrote about the influence comics were playing on the latest fashion creations.
Piaggi noted how the "Batmania" trend was very popular in the ‘60s with at least one thousand products available - from pens to bath salts - with the Batman logo or character. 
The popularity of comics brought a new figure in Italy, that, Piaggi argued, had somehow been anticipated by “The Phantom” fan and comic book collector Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) in Elio Petri’s La decima vittima (The 10th Victim, 1965). 
Comics had also literally invaded the French and Italian A/W 1968 prêt-à-porter catwalks: fluorescent outfits were rather fashionable, completed by plastic Perspex bracelets and necklaces that could have been the perfect complement to the costumes of some fantastically sexy superheroine. In the meantime, model Veruschka launched a Spider-man-like make-up on the pages of Italian magazine Linea Italiana. 
The latest comic-inspired creation, according to Piaggi, was courtesy of French fashion designer Emmanuelle Khanh who created for Missoni two semi-transparent skin-tight chauve-souris jumpsuits with long sleeves and slightly high neck, inspired by Batman’s costumes and vampires.
In black and dark blue with batwings and in their shorts or flared trouser version, Khanh’s creations could have been worn in nightclubs, at home or at a costume party. 
Piaggi seemed unfazed by the new trend: these modern creations that the new pop culture claimed were inspired by Batman, weren't new at all, the critic stated. 
Many years before, Irma Vep's character Musidora in Louis Feuillade’s The Vampires (1915) and Carroll Borland's Luna Mora in Tod Browning’s Mark of the Vampires (1935) had already launched a "batwing" trend. Since then the most fashionable ateliers in the world - from Poiret to Cardin’s - had produced vampire-inspired outfits and garments with "batwings", while the word "vamp", abbreviation of "vampire", had entered the vocabulary to indicate a sensual, fatal and mysterious woman.
Though sexy, there wasn't much mystery in Khanh's Batman-inspired suits and, what was worst, Piaggi claimed, that was only the beginning of a new craze that, as the Superheroes exhibition proves (though maybe a little too hard...), is still going strong. See Rick Owens' Batman-inspired zippered leather and cashmere suit made for Vogue (May 2008 Issue) to have further confirmation to this theory.
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