Santa Claus, the Fashion Icon

“Mocha Mousse” might have garnered Pantone’s 2025 Color of the Year honors, but is anyone really turning heads in a tasteful brown? Statement dressing loves a statement hue, and it doesn’t get much more statement-y than eye-popping red.

When it comes to red dressing, one figure stands head and freedman’s cap above the rest. So, settle down, Beelzebub. Move aside, Red Riding Hood. You can’t hold a cinnamon-spiced candle to the King of Crimson, that right jolly old elf himself, Santa Claus.

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St. Nick’s signature style occasionally gets credited to Coca-Cola, the company for which he has long served as a seasonal brand ambassador. But Santa’s red slay predates his partnership with Coke, which began in 1931. ’Twas the 19th-century cartoonist Thomas Nast who cemented the modern image of Father Christmas in the popular imagination through a series of drawings for Harper’s Weekly. Nast’s original vision for Santa coursed with patriotism, featuring a Captain America-esque Stars-and-Stripes theme. But almost immediately the artist switched to a more universal rendering — solid red — that quickly became the sartorial shorthand for the Christmas season. It has been co-opted by countless admirers ever since.

Like any great fashion inspiration, the Santa suit is open to interpretation. It was given sequined flourish in 1954’s “White Christmas,” with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye donning spangled-up versions for the film’s titular musical number, while their lady friends, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen, sashayed in floor-length, full-skirted takes on Mrs. Claus-couture.

Leap forward four decades, and reigning “queen of the season” Mariah Carey put a flirtatious spin on the trope, transforming Santa’s pajama-like silhouette into a second-skin bodysuit for the cover of her album “Merry Christmas.” Fifteen years later, she updated the construct, going off-the-shoulder for 2010’s cleverly titled “Merry Christmas II You.” And if one requires more than a flash of clavicle to get through the cold winter months, a cursory search for “sexy Santa” yields a wealth of red results blue enough to earn their wearers at least one lump of coal.

One would be hard pressed to find an outfit with a higher universal Q rating than Santa’s. But for those not named Mariah, literal translations are hard to pull off. And while designers prefer their wares strut down a runway rather than shimmy down a chimney, over the years, consciously or otherwise, many have referenced holiday’s greatest style icon.

Simone Rocha is no stranger to crimsons and scarlets — red is one of her signature colors. While her aesthetic skews more romantic-moody femme than jovial North Pole, her spring 2025 collection delivered Santa style with a side of alt Sugar Plum Fairy in a bright red, puff-sleeved minidress-cum-tutu atop crystal-emblazoned thigh-highs and demurely dissonant mary janes.

Long before Rocha embraced the hue, Valentino cemented his place as luxury’s primo purveyor of red, making the color a cornerstone of his zhuzhed-up style. So much so that in 2022, Assouline published “Valentino Rosso” by Charlie Porter, a coffee table book that chronicles the brand’s half-century-plus love affair with scarlet.

The house founder’s fascination with the festive color started in 1959 with “La Fiesta,” a mid-length tulle frock that would enliven any holiday soiree, and continued through to his swan song show, spring 2008 couture, in which his final curtain call was preceded by a parade of models all bedecked in Santa’s shade. The house’s devotion to the color didn’t retire with its founder. One particularly Christmas-y look, from Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli’s spring 2014 collection, featured an ornate spin on folksy in St. Nick’s red, white and black palette: a craft-lace number topped off with a boxy knit that resembled something your Aunt Bea might have worn to her office eggnog fete.

For a more avant-garde approach, there’s the visionary who once declared, “red is black.” Rei Kawakubo’s oeuvre may seem too out there for riffs on a figure as traditional as Santa, but what is a reindeer-drawn sleigh if not a slice of wonderfully over-the-top absurdism? Kawakubo’s spring 2015 Comme des Garçons collection featured daring reds almost exclusively. While the clothes may not have explicitly screamed “Christmas,” a dramatically peaked hood would surely provide ample warmth on a cold winter’s night. Meanwhile, a dizzyingly draped asymmetrical affair with theatrical collar looked equal parts cozy and odd, suggesting that comfort and joy can take many forms. (And who doesn’t find joy in Kawakubo’s madcap mastery?)

Of course, these are far-afield interpretations of Kris Kringle chic. But lose the white fur and broad black belt and Santa’s suit is, after all, just a suit — a head-to-toe red velvet suit. Enter Tom Ford, who worked that concept with ultra-glam ’70s flair at Gucci for fall 1996. His take quickly crossed over from runway cool to gen-pop iconic thanks to perpetual It-girl Gwyneth Paltrow, who wore it to the 1996 MTV Music Video Awards.

Just like Santa’s uniform, the appeal of Ford’s suit has proven timeless. In the 2021 Aria collection celebrating Gucci’s 100-year anniversary, Alessandro Michele checked his forebear’s list not once but twice, with his-and-hers versions. Somewhere, Bing and Rosemary dreamt of one more White Christmas.

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