Liminal Glamour: Dressing in the In-Between

05/03/2025

By NOCTURA Magazine

We live in the age of transition. Nothing is quite fixed: gender, geography, identity, emotion. Everything shifts—fluid, uncertain, and shimmering. In this moment, fashion responds not by offering certainty, but by embracing liminality—the beauty of being between.

Liminality is that flickering zone: neither here nor there, but caught mid-transformation. It’s the ghost of a dress in motion, the unfinished edge of a sketch, a garment that feels like both armor and surrender. This in-between quality has become the language of a new generation of designers—those who reject perfection in favor of process, texture, discomfort, pause.

Look to Aaron Esh’s tailored silhouettes that fall apart mid-body, or Chet Lo’s soft-knitted spikes—forms that speak of intimacy and confrontation all at once. Grace Ling’s 3D-sculpted metallics curve like body parts, yet float like digital avatars. Torishéju Dumi layers memory through fabric, as if each piece is haunted by ancestors. These designers don't offer full stops—they give us ellipses.

In the showroom and on the street, liminality also reshapes how we wear clothes. Men in sheer silk, women in oversized tailoring, bodies not performing gender but revealing fractures. There’s pleasure in not choosing. There’s meaning in the undone.

This aesthetic is not indecisive—it’s radical. Because to inhabit the liminal is to resist definition. It’s to say: I’m not one thing, and I don’t have to be. In a world that craves clarity and categorization, the in-between becomes a kind of rebellion. The refusal to resolve becomes its own glamour.

In NOCTURA’s eyes, this is where contemporary beauty lives—not in resolution, but in transition. We look to artists, designers, performers who dare to remain unfinished. The fabric is frayed. The line is blurred. The story is still unfolding.

Let it be.