The standards of beauty set by Michelangelo and da Vinci could have shaped society’s understanding of the ‘ideal body’ for the very best a part of 600 years, but fashion designers now look like hawking yet one more unrealistic expectation – travelling further into the recesses of Greco-Roman culture and casting the centaur as a recent symbol of thoroughbred sexuality. It is not any longer enough to be athletic, lean, skinny! Fashion fans must sprout an additional pair of legs, hooves, and a giant ol’ buccaneering tail. 

Over the past yr, now we have seen Adam Driver sprinting towards the ocean in a Burberry campaign, his body metamorphosing right into a broad-chested, half-man-half-horse figure. Then there was Julia Fox in a pair of fallopian fit trousers, her deltoid waistband and bulbous joints inspired by the musculature of a carthorse’s legs. It was a moment rivalled only by Bella Hadid who emerged as a CGI Pegasus within the precursor to Mugler’s SS21 collection. Then there was Alan Crocetti, who debuted his AW22 collection on the back of a elfin-eared stallion, his body shoved right into a four-legged, tailored tux. These aren’t just the type of preppy horse girls that fashion has turn into in thrall to over recent seasons, but actual horse-girls. 

It goes further than all those models galloping horseback onto Chanel’s couture runway back in January and even Jacquemus leading an alabaster horse down his SS16 catwalk. It has now turn into clear that fashion is undergoing some type of deeply spiritual equine alliance, chiming with popular culture’s general lean into the preternatural. Think Eartheater, covered in genitalia-like snails, the severed head of Arca that spooked guests at Shayne Oliver’s recent fashion show, the type of freaky stuff that Lotta Volkova might post to Instagram, like that horse that was cruelly Photoshopped into the Miu Miu set, and absolutely anything Grimes does.

Whatever the exact origin of the centaur, these creatures entered into Greek mythology as feral and excitable half-bloods – harking back to Collina Strada’s anamorphic AW21 show. They weren’t evil or anything, just branded as uncivilised by ancient standards, which might be something to do with the Vibe Shift. All that is to say: Mr Tumnus x Balenciaga when???