The Tragedy of the Belladonna Archetype
How a forgotten 1970s anime redefined sensual rebellion in art and fashion.
Hello, darlings. I can guess that you definitely have suspicions that I am a massive anime lover (dweeb). I have unknowingly started a series where I talk about anime shows, or movies and their influences in our day to day society, specifically in fashion. Earlier this week, I watched ‘Belladonna of Sadness’ for the first time and was heavily inspired to write my about thoughts on it.
In 1973, Belladonna of Sadness, directed by Eiichi Yamamoto, emerged as one of the most hauntingly beautiful films ever made and one of the most misunderstood. With its watercolor stills, hallucinatory eroticism, and feminist undercurrents, the film tells the story of Jeanne, a woman assaulted, exiled, and ultimately empowered by witchcraft and her own desire. Though initially dismissed as pornographic, Belladonna has since become an enduring symbol of female transcendence through tragedy, a visual bible of the “Belladonna archetype.”
Visually, Belladonna of Sadness was decades ahead of its time. The art direction abundant in sensual psychedelia: long-haired nymphs melting into landscapes, their bodies both canvases and battlegrounds. It influenced later avant-garde filmmakers, music videos (think FKA twigs’ Cellophane or Florence + The Machine’s Big God), and even high fashion editorials that romanticize female hysteria. Designers like Alessandro Michele and John Galliano have both cited witchcraft, paganism, and divine femininity as muses, tracing a direct line to Belladonna’s spiritual rebellion.
From Poison to Passion: The Italian Origins of Belladonna
Italy birthed the word Belladonna, but also the obsession it represents. In Renaissance art, the Madonna and the femme fatale shared the same face — Botticelli’s Venus and Caravaggio’s Judith were two sides of the same woman. Beauty was divine, but also dangerous. In pharmacology, Belladonna (the plant) was both medicine and poison — mirroring how the feminine ideal was both worshipped and punished.
By the 20th century, this duality transformed into a visual language across art and fashion. Designers like Elsa Schiaparelli and later Alexander McQueen would translate this archetype into couture: corsets like cages, veils like wounds, gowns that symbolised devotion through decay. Italy, especially through Dolce & Gabbana, has continually resurrected the Belladonna spirit: Sicilian lace dresses paired with crucifix jewelry, widow’s veils turned into runway statements. To be beautiful in this sense is being exploited and/or sentenced to death.
Belladonna as Fashion’s Femme Fatale
Fashion (like most art forms) has long been obsessed with the Belladonna archetype, “the woman who seduces” through melancholy. In Italian art, she’s painted as La Donna Velata or La Fornarina: women who are both idolized and condemned. By the Renaissance, “belladonna” wasn’t just a plant but a prescription for beauty. Women used drops of the deadly extract to dilate their pupils, giving them an ethereal, almost possessed look.
In fashion, this aesthetic persists. Think of Valentino’s lace gowns; fragile but daring; Dolce & Gabbana’s Sicilian widows draped in black lace; or even Gucci’s gothic romanticism under Michele, where crucifixes and corsets walk hand in hand. These are modern iterations of the Belladonna woman, divine and doomed.
Malèna: The Italian Belladonna
Similarly, Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malèna (2000), starring Monica Bellucci, is a meditation on this archetype’s cruelty. Malèna is the town’s beauty, desired and despised in equal measure. Her dresses are nipped waists, pencil skirts, soft blouses; they become her armor and her curse. Bellucci moves through Sicily like a living sculpture, her every step turning into spectacle.
Costume designer Maurizio Millenotti uses 1940s fashion to articulate the politics of beauty. Neutral tones and sharp tailoring show a woman performing modesty in a society that punishes allure. Malèna, like Jeanne in Belladonna of Sadness, is a victim of collective projection; her tragedy lies not in her beauty, but in what the world decides it means.
The Modern Belladonna: Between Feminism and Fetishism
The Belladonna archetype exists at the intersection of eroticism and martyrdom. She is never just looked at; she is consumed.
The tragedy of the Belladonna archetype lies in how she’s misunderstood. She embodies a rebellion against patriarchal control, but is often aestheticized by the very system she defies. Her sensuality becomes spectacle, her pain becomes palette. In art, this mirrors the fate of countless muses — from Salomé to Ophelia to Marilyn Monroe — women whose image outlived their autonomy.
Yet, the Belladonna figure keeps reappearing, because she represents a truth we can’t look away from: the beauty that frightens us. In contemporary culture, she surfaces in the witchcore revival, the coquette-meets-goth aesthetic, and the reclamation of eroticism as empowerment. As fashion theorist Elizabeth Wilson wrote, “Fashion is dressed up fear.” And Belladonna? Malèna? She is fear, dressed up beautifully.
To wear Belladonna is to perform. It’s an acceptance that femininity, in all its power and peril, is never safe. It’s what makes her tragic and timeless.
XOXO, The Fashion Stock Market
Cover Photo: Movie Sleuth
