We’ve gone from pointed conical bra tops to full ammo

Armed and pointed. (Left) Jean Paul Gaultier by Duran Lantink. Photo: Jean Paul Gaultier. (Right) Dikson Mah. Photo: Iskandar Bin Ibrahim/Vogue SG

They look less like bra tops and more like a pair of miniature, textile-covered missiles, ready for a full-on assault. We have seen it at Jean Paul Gaultier, where Duran Lantink offered a very potent warhead and now, we’re seeing a more pointed ammunition by Dikson Mah, possibly atomic-charged. The simple bra top has become an architectural marvel, turning the whole situation from a droop into a launch. Even the provocative bras of old JPG that Madonna wore with defiance and delight in the ’90s are now drowsy, micro-fied traffic cones. The weaponisation of the female form continues to be the gift that keeps on thrusting.

Witnessed recently on our own shores was Malaysian Dikson Mah’s torpedoic bra at the Next in Vogue gala. The deployment was first made at the 2025 Mercedes-Benz Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, where Mr Mah’s body-celebrating collection was enthusiastically received. His tack-sharp coli (bra) seemed to be a parody of Lady Gaga’s machine gun bra that, after considerable protests following the Newton, Connecticut massacre, had to be disarmed mid-concert in 2013. It is hard to see from online photos and reels what Mr Mah’s pointy protuberances are made of, but it seemed to be constructed from molded thermoplastic, with a crude strap at the back to secure the front’s aggressive projection. The tips alone looked deadly enough to make a meletup (explosion) feel redundant.

The weaponisation of the female form continues to be the gift that keeps on thrusting

About four days before Mr Mah’s show at the TRX Exchange, Duran Lantink debuted his JPG collection at the Musée du Quai Branly. In the show that was a tribute to unfiltered anatomia, Mr Lantink, as expected, had fun with reimagining the classic JPG conical bra, except now, the cone gave way to a cigar-shape missile (or was that a shrunken blimp?). It did remind us of the Comme des Garçon top from 2019, except the massive lumps protruded from the hips! As with Mr Mah’s bra, we can only hazzard a guess about its construction. It is likely that foam padding was used to achieve the rounded ‘head’, as had been the case with many of Mr Lantink’s past bodily protrusions. This allowed him to create a more raw, visceral, and often jarringly fleshy distortion of the human form, playing heavily on the boundary between fashion and performance art. Mr Lantink’s use of soft, tactile material weaponises the body itself, turning volume into a startling, mammary provocation.

While the end results of both designer’s reimagining of the conical bra are different, one thing is oddly similar: the outward, splayed positioning of the ‘cups’. This is the definitive shift from the classic, front-facing, vertex threat of the Gaultier era to a new kind of defense. The original cone was a focused shield of defiance; the current splayed silhouette is a three-dimensional deterrence. We don’t know if either of them speak for feminism. If it does, it is not the feminism of subtle power or intellectual argument. It is a maximalist, in-your-face, confrontational feminism that equates power with visibility and physical presence. While Dickson Mah delivered this message with the clarity of technological command, Duran Lantink used absurdist humour to declare that the body is simply raw material, a canvas for incitement-chic that is entirely self-owned and aggressively unbounded. The splayed torpedo is a transatlantic declaration: the feminine form is now an active projection of power.