Damien Thorn Was Sent To Destroy Us, One Haunted School Uniform At A Time

Style Archive: a series in which we fear the prophets born from jackals, and how they seek to bring about the end of man (and menswear) today. This week: the Antichrist himself, and his penchant for Victoriana.

Damien Thorn had it all going for him: a doting father, good schools, nannies that would die for him (one did, actually), and everything a child could ever need on their mission to extinguish humanity at large. You could say the stars were aligned. Shame he was so bent on Armageddon, really. But as well as plague and pestilence, little Damien was a prophet of something else: haunted, Victorian menswear. Or, more accurately, school-wear.

"Damien darling, can you stop climbing on mummy’s coffin, please? There’s a good boy"

Richard Donner's 1976 devil-spawn epic, The Omen, saw its protagonist navigate a tricky childhood in threads that would make Prada's head boy weep. Little blazers with big lapels. Baker boy hats from St. Beelzebub's School for Boys. Silhouettes sharp enough to cut the flesh of Christ. Oh, and black. Lots of black.

Granted, his choice of clothes (and those of the bathmophobic Katherine Thorn) were an after-thought in Mephistopheles' grand plan. But they still provided the blueprint for every frightening, pale-cheeked child of modern cinema, from the perma-shriek kids of 2001's The Others to The Children Of The Corn's scyther-in-chief, Isaac Chroner. Oddly, though, Damien could've well been on the mood boards for a slew of leading menswear brands - the sort that place scholastic-slash-funeral attire at the front of their tailored output. God's truth.

This stuff is Thom Browne, if he spent his youth setting fire to dog shelters; Dolce & Gabbana, if Domenico and Stefano had set-up shop not in Milan, but next to the Ninth Circle of Hell. These designers stripped Damian's wardrobe of its most devilish elements, but kept the sharp, school uniform-inspired silhouettes that, it turns out, work as well on non-descendants of Satan: A$AP Rocky, Cole Sprouse and Daniel Kaluuya have all tried Omen-a-like tailoring. Black suits were big in Seventies horror, and fashion's going to back to black today.

The suits alone didn't make Damien the ultimate problem child, though: decapitating priests and murdering your adopted mother are arguably more horrifying than a messy trouser break, or even buttoning a blazer up incorrectly. But his wardrobe proves that one piece of style advice applies to all planes of divinity: dress for the job you want, not the job you have.