Fashion Was Obsessed with Ancient Greece Long Before Nolan’s The Odyssey

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Zendaya and Law Roach gave us webbed gowns for Spider-Man and bridal-inspired attire for The Drama, but their most recent method dressing campaign has deeper fashion roots. In Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, out this week, Zendaya plays Athena, goddess of war and wisdom, and her accompanying red carpet looks have pulled out all the stops when it comes to Grecian style.

At premiere after premiere, she’s worn elaborate draping, clean lines, and a largely all-white color palette. There was the white, micro-pleated Trussardi dress from 2006. The white custom column dress from Jacquemus worn with earrings constructed from first-millennium B.C. ancient discs (casual). For one fashion double-header, she wore a Valentino dress with a silk leaf bodice and draped skirt, followed by a Schiaparelli couture gown with a white sculpted bust that came hand-delivered from the show that morning. Then there was the dramatic white skirt suit from Givenchy’s Spring 1997 couture collection, the vintage Alberta Ferretti from Spring 2008 with knee-high gladiator sandals, and the white cotton Jacquemus dress from Spring 2027.

It all culminated with her New York premiere look: a draped gown from Matières Fécales complete with its own set of life-size feather wings. The look alluded to the famous statue The Winged Victory of Samothrace, which stands in the Louvre today. Her makeup centered a heavy application of blush, as if she’d “flown too close to the sun,” as her makeup artist told Bazaar, working in an Icarus reference on top of all the other mythology on display.

The Odyssey is not historically accurate—attributed to the Greek poet Homer, it was written centuries after it was meant to take place and is generous in its reconstruction (not to mention filled with monsters). And the film’s costumes aren’t, either. Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, is known for her work on Bridgerton, a famous historical liberty-taker. In an essay in Lewis’s Mag Substack, fashion writer Jeremy Lewis posits, based on the trailer, that the film’s clothes embrace a surrealist interpretation of Mycenaean Greece.

Zendaya’s press looks take liberties with the history, as well—but how could they not? For the last century, the fashion world has been interpreting and reinterpreting ancient Greek attire, to the point where it’s almost impossible to outline the ways Classical references have influenced the way we dress. In fact, Greek fashion is build directly into the ethos of modern wardrobes. The “chiton” and “peplos,” the two archetypal styles of tunics worn in ancient Greece—the ones you think of around Halloween—set a precedent for clothing that freed the human form from constriction regardless of gender.

Ahead, we’re taking a zoomed-out look at how designers have reinterpreted Grecian style through their own artistic lenses.

Freeing the Female Form in the Early 20th Century

It wasn’t until the early 1900s that the fashionable world began to break from corsetry as the norm of women’s dress. Paul Poiret was one of the designers who spearheaded this movement, and he often looked to Grecian references to create loosely draped garments that freed the body. Most notably, he designed a classical Grecian dress for the dancer Isadora Duncan in 1906 that freed her waist with folds of fabric expertly draped, tucked, and secured with rope-like sashes. (The prominence of dancing—and the desire for movement in clothing—in the roaring ’20s embraced these ideas.) His famous cocoon coat draws inspiration from Greek silhouettes and also looks east to kimonos to create something with unbroken lines and clever draping.

The couturier Madeleine Vionnet also used these classical silhouettes to help un-doll-ify women’s clothing in the ’20s and ’30s. She often constructed garments from one piece of fabric sans fastenings using strategic draping to create the shapes of her ethereal dresses. She looked specifically at ancient Greek “chitons” to inspire her pieces in which swathes of breathable fabric were tied at the waist.

Ancient Greece greatly inspired the Spanish-born Venetian designer Mariano Fortuny, known for his heat-based silk micro pleating technique. His defining “Delphos” gown was inspired by a “chiton” as seen in the sculpture Charioteer of Delphi. The gown was famously worn by Italian socialite Marchesa Casati, deemed a fashion futurist at the time, in 1909. More specifically, Fortuny loved the simplicity and the freedom of Classical attire.

Doing It Again Midcentury

Christian Dior debuted his iconic “New Look” at the end of World War II, ushering in the return of restrictive clothing with elements like corsetry, boning, padded hips and shoulders, and full skirts. A new cohort of designers had the opportunity to revolutionize women’s dress by freeing their forms one more time. Madame Grès was a couturier who did just that with her excellence in draping in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Her Hellenic-style jersey dresses and micro-pleated gowns were more like sculptures than clothing. Their fluidity was subservient to the female body, a particularly radical notion at that time.

Born to Greek parents in 1904, Jean Dessès was a couturier known for his eveningwear especially popular in the ’40s and ’50s. He took great inspiration from Classical sculpture. His gowns turned his patrons into goddesses with complex patterns of pleatwork in light, delicate fabric.

Claire McCardell was a designer who revolutionized the way American women dress with her functional, affordable, and beautiful ready-to-wear beginning in the 1930s and extending through the ’50s and on. One of her innovative designs, the “Monastic” dress, leaned Greek revival in nature. It’s a somewhat shapeless tent-style dress with heavy pleating through the middle—a more direct nod to the work of Madame Grès. The wearer could wrap a thin, self-tie sash around her waist multiple times to give the dress some shape; otherwise it lacked darts, a structured waist, or fussy closures.

Mary McFadden created a distinct world with her designs, once inspired by her travels and ancient civilizations. One of her favorite sources of inspiration was Classical Greece. She coined her own fabric, the “Marii” micro-pleat synthetic charmeuse used on gowns that drew inspiration from ancient Greek chitons.

Campy Allusions at the End of the Century

The designers of the late 20th century were referencing Classical ideas in a much more playful way, turning them on their head or totally reimagining them. Norma Kamali first designed her “Diana” dress, a one-shouldered ruched, stretch jersey gown, in the 1970s, though it continues to be sold (and worn) to this day. It pays the most literal homage to Grecian wardrobes, though a number of other designs of hers have done similarly.

Gianni Versace was from Reggio Calabria, one of the first Greek colonies of Southern Italy, and a town whose history became a great source of inspiration for him. (He grew up close to the remains of a Greek temple.) The designer toyed specifically with the symbolism of ancient Greece, working both the visage of Medusa and the Greca motif into the brand’s imagery and logos in the 1980s. He often paid homage (sometimes parodic) to Classical mythology, dressing his models up like gods and warrior princesses.

Tribute Collections Moving Into the 2000s

By the time the millennium rolled around, designers were referencing designers who referenced ancient Greek ideas. Fashion shows were also evolving into more of a spectacle, often with themes. Many designers selected either the rich visual culture of Classical Greece or the designers who first referenced those ideas. Lee McQueen’s couture debut for Givenchy for Spring 1997 was titled the “Search for the Golden Fleece” and inspired by Greek mythology. With a color palette of white and gold, McQueen crafted clothes for warrior goddesses with Hellenistic draping and symbolism of the Argonauts.

For Spring 2005, the Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto themed his collection around the work of Madame Grès, whose work was famously a great inspiration for him. He reinterpreted her ideas, and by default her Hellenistic references, through intricate, twisted pleatwork on white cotton shirting and silk eveningwear.

Never one to stick to a reference in a singular way, Jean Paul Gaultier clashed elements of ancient Greek attire with Parisian style archetypes for his Spring 2006 couture collection. The result featured goddess-style dresses strung with tassel belts, billowing, transparent harem pants, and pleated silk gowns.

For their Spring 2016 couture show, Valentino’s previous design leads Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli devoted their collection to the work of Fortuny, specifically his “Delphos” dress, and, in that sense, his Grecian-style silk pleating. Both Chiuri and Piccioli continued to use Grecian influences in their subsequent roles at Dior and Valentino, respectively.

Later into his tenure at Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld dedicated his Resort 2018 collection to ancient Greece, more specifically the bust of Venus that Coco Chanel had in her Rue Cambon apartment, with a set reminiscent of the Acropolis staged in the Grand Palais. He fashioned column-heeled gladiator sandals, prints made of ancient pottery motifs, and goddess-like draped gowns.

Dolce & Gabbana showed their 2019 Alta Moda collection in Sicily, nodding to the areas of Italy once known as Magna Graecia due to its early Greek colonization. The designers dressed their models up like nymphs and warriors with Cleopatra-style gowns, elaborate gold belts, and twisted drapery.

Finally, in 2022, Dior took its Cruise show to Athens. Grazia Chiuri transformed her models into modern Athenian athletes with reinterpretations of the peplos silhouette, one she played with throughout her tenure at the house, styled with sneakers.

Contemporary Fashion Trends

Today, it’s much harder to associate contemporary designers with one specific look. There are just too many designer who produce pieces—that are then copied—at too high a rate. Instead, larger trends reminiscent of ancient Greece seemed to take hold en masse. In the 2010s, gladiator sandals became the default choice of stylish summer shoes. The shoe features a cage of interlocking, often knuckles, leather straps that, for the daring, can stretch all the way up to the knee. These were a favorite among festivalgoers circa 2016.

In recent years, draping has played heavily into the collections of brands ranging from Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe to Maria Grazia’s Dior to Pieter Mulier’s Alaïa on the runways. As we just saw for Fall 2026 couture, the trend was signed off on by Daniel Roseberry at Schiaparelli and Piccioli at Balenciaga.

Breastplates, too, are an unexpected Grecian-inspired trend that has remained largely confined to the red carpet. The 2026 Met Gala, themed around the body, saw this style of bodice-meets-body armor worn by Kendall and Kylie Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Yseult, and Kim Kardashian. And of course, Zendaya herself sported one for this press tour—bringing things full circle.

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