Why Do We Want to Be the Villain for One Night? The Story of My Vampire Queen Collection

There is something I notice every Halloween. For most of the year, we are expected to be good. We go to work, answer emails, take care of children, families, businesses and homes. We are polite, responsible and reasonable. We wear things appropriate for wherever we are going and spend an enormous part of adult life simply making sure everything works.

And then Halloween arrives, and something changes.

Women who spend the rest of the year being perfectly responsible suddenly don’t want to become princesses. They want to become witches, dead brides, dark queens and vampires. They reach for black lace, dramatic makeup, impossible crowns and characters they would never take to work on Monday morning. And every year, watching it happen, I think the same thing: I absolutely love this.

Not because I think we secretly want to become horrible people. I think it is much simpler and much more interesting than that. Most of us contain versions of ourselves that don’t get much room in ordinary life — the dramatic woman, the extravagant woman, the femme fatale, the woman who doesn’t particularly care whether everyone approves of her. Halloween gives us a safe, playful permission to let her out for one night.

Perhaps that is why I have wanted to create a Vampire Queen for years.

The Vampire I Had Been Waiting Years to Create

I am an enormous Halloween lover. It is probably the most creatively exciting time of the year for me, because suddenly creativity seems to be everywhere. People invent characters, make costumes, experiment with makeup and combine things that would make absolutely no sense on an ordinary Tuesday. I love watching how differently people interpret the same idea. Give ten women the word vampire and they may create ten completely different women.

There are several characters I have carried around in my imagination for years and still want to create properly. A dead bride is one of them. A witch is another. But the vampire has been waiting there for a very long time. I have been fascinated by vampires since I was young — and yes, I absolutely had my Twilight era — although strangely, the part that fascinates me has never really been the blood or horror. I’m actually not particularly attracted to gore.

For me, the vampire has always been a femme fatale.

She is beautiful, but there is something dangerous about her beauty. She is elegant, seductive and slightly unreachable. She knows what she wants. She doesn’t rush. She doesn’t need to convince anyone that she has power, because everyone in the room already feels it. There is something almost unnerving about how calm I imagine her to be. She could have been alive for hundreds of years. Why would she hurry?

That became the woman I wanted to create this year: not simply a vampire, but a Vampire Queen. A woman whose presence changes the atmosphere of the room before she has even said anything.

Somehow, She Arrived in the Middle of Complete Chaos

The irony is that this very composed woman came into existence during one of the least composed periods in my atelier.

This summer, we decided to move our studio back into the centre of Liberec. After roughly a year and a half of feeling as though I did almost nothing except work, I finally had to admit that something needed to change. I love what I do enormously, but I don’t want to build a beautiful business by disappearing from the rest of my own life. I needed healthier boundaries between work and home, and moving the atelier became part of that decision.

Of course, we chose to do this just before the busiest season of our year. Halloween did not politely wait for us to unpack. Orders started arriving, production started moving again and boxes remained everywhere. At some point we simply accepted that the atelier would probably not be completely unpacked until November.

Then, right in the middle of that chaos, I noticed a tiny opening in my calendar.

I had wanted to photograph a vampire for years. Suddenly there was a weekend when it might actually be possible. I wrote to Barka, our photographer. I contacted Sára, our model, and our makeup artist. Somehow, almost suspiciously, everyone was available.

I remember thinking: Fine. We’re doing the vampire.

Years of imagining her, and suddenly I had one weekend to make her exist.

Five Vampire Queens and the Colour of Dried Blood

Once I started designing, I completely disappeared into the world.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted the collection to feel royal. I wasn’t interested in making generic vampire accessories with a little red added to make the theme obvious. The woman in my imagination was a queen, so the first two major designs became larger, more architectural crowns with genuinely regal silhouettes. I then created smaller tiaras for women who love the same world but don’t necessarily want to enter a party wearing the largest crown in the room.

The collection eventually became five sets built from crowns and tiaras, necklaces and earrings, with some designs accompanied by lace masks or finger claws for a more complete transformation. But one detail began connecting almost everything: blood-red drops of glass.

For years, we have worked with beautiful glass elements in custom colours, and for this collection I wanted a very particular red. Not bright scarlet. Not the obvious artificial red we immediately associate with Halloween decorations. I wanted something deeper — burgundy, almost wine coloured, like blood after it has darkened. I began using drop-shaped glass elements in the jewellery so that they appeared almost like tiny drops of blood suspended from the pieces.

I expected the burgundy to work beautifully with black. What surprised me was how much I loved it against aged silver. The combination immediately gave the pieces another feeling: older, richer, slightly mysterious and much more sophisticated than the obvious red-and-black vampire palette I could have chosen.

These are some of my favourite moments in designing. I can begin with a very clear idea in my head, but then a material does something unexpected and the design becomes better because I was willing to listen to it.

How Did Something Terrifying Become Something We Want to Be?

While creating this collection, I started thinking about how strange our relationship with vampires actually is.

The vampire of older European folklore was not necessarily the beautiful, aristocratic creature we imagine today. During the eighteenth century, fears surrounding supposed vampires spread through parts of Central and Eastern Europe. Accounts of the dead returning to harm the living existed alongside limited understanding of what naturally happened to a body after death, and reports of alleged vampires became serious enough to attract official attention.

Over the centuries, however, the vampire changed. Literature transformed it. Theatre transformed it again. Cinema, television, fashion and popular culture continued adding layer after layer until the creature people once feared had become something entirely different: elegant, seductive, mysterious and frequently beautiful. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, became one of the most influential steps in shaping the modern vampire imagination, but the image continued evolving long after him.

I find that transformation fascinating because somewhere along the way, we stopped only asking, What if the vampire comes for me?

We also started asking: What if I could be her?

We gave the vampire beauty, power, sensuality, mystery and immortality. We turned fear into fantasy. And perhaps that explains why, more than a century later, women are still putting on black dresses, red lipstick and fangs every October.

Although, as I discovered during our photoshoot, the fangs are optional.

The Photoshoot Where Almost Nothing Went According to Plan

We photographed the Vampire Queen Collection in Barka’s studio. We had a gothic backdrop, deep burgundy curtains and all the ingredients for the dramatic world I had imagined. We had also bought several different sets of vampire fangs because, obviously, our vampire needed teeth.

None of them worked.

We tried one set. Then another. And eventually we reached that familiar point in every creative project when you have to decide whether to keep fighting with the original idea simply because it was part of the plan, or admit that the plan isn’t working.

We chose the second option.

The teeth went away. For the photographs where they were important, Barka could solve the problem beautifully in post-production; for the videos, we simply decided that Sára did not need them. The character was already there. There was no reason to make the entire team miserable over two little pieces of plastic.

The teeth, unfortunately, were not our only complication. Our makeup artist had roughly an hour to create the entire look and was working under enormous time pressure. Then Sára began feeling unwell when we arrived at the shoot and wasn’t feeling particularly good for much of the session. Barka, meanwhile, was fighting with the light and wasn’t satisfied with what she was seeing. We kept adjusting it, moving things and trying again.

This is the part of creative work that rarely exists in the finished photograph. When someone eventually sees one beautiful image online, she doesn’t see the failed vampire teeth, the clock, the lighting adjustments, the model trying to work despite feeling unwell or the fact that somewhere across town my new atelier was still full of boxes.

She only sees the moment when somehow, against all of that, everything finally comes together.

And Then Sára Sat Down

After all the adjusting and experimenting, Sára sat down on the couch.

She was wearing the dress, the crown and the jewellery. Behind her were the gothic backdrop and burgundy curtains Barka had prepared. The light finally fell where it needed to fall.

And suddenly I saw her.

There she was.

Sára is one of those models who somehow looks beautiful in almost anything we put on her, and I have watched her become many different women in front of our cameras. But this moment was special. The crown, the burgundy, the black, the old silver, the makeup, the room — all those separate decisions suddenly became one character.

She looked exactly like the woman I had been imagining.

Not a bloody monster. Not a Halloween cliché.

A queen.

Beautiful, cold, elegant and completely composed. The kind of woman who doesn’t need to check whether people are looking at her because she already knows they are.

For a collection that had existed only in my imagination a few days earlier, it was a pretty extraordinary moment.

The Vampire Queen Taught Me Something About Myself Too

At some point during the shoot, Sára said something about me being the boss — the person who organises everything. It made me laugh, but later I kept thinking about it.

The finished photographs make creative work look wonderfully effortless. A model is standing there. Someone has done her makeup. There is a beautiful crown on her head. The lighting is perfect. Click.

But somebody first had to imagine that world and then convince reality to cooperate.

The collection had to be designed and made. The photographer, model and makeup artist had to be available at the same time. The styling had to work. The location had to work. Everyone needed to know where to be and when. When the teeth failed, we needed another solution. When the light wasn’t right, we had to keep going. When something unexpected happened, somebody had to decide what happened next.

And I realised:

Sára was right.

I am actually quite good at that.

It made me think about the Vampire Queen I had been describing before the shoot: calm, decisive, powerful without needing to make a spectacle of her power. Obviously I am not planning to become an immortal blood-drinking monarch anytime soon, but I recognise something in that archetype that I have grown to appreciate much more as I get older.

Quiet authority.

Knowing what you want. Making decisions. Bringing people together. Staying flexible when the original plan fails. Creating something coherent from a hundred moving parts.

Perhaps there was a little more of me in this collection than I realised.

Why Do So Many Women Want to Be Darker on Halloween?

This is where the story became more interesting to me than the collection itself.

Why, when we are finally allowed to become almost anything, are so many women attracted to darker characters?

Why the witch instead of the fairy? The dead bride instead of the bride? The Vampire Queen instead of the princess?

I don’t think the answer is that women secretly want to be evil. I think we simply spend an enormous amount of our lives being asked to be good.

Good daughters. Good partners. Good mothers. Good colleagues. Pleasant women. Reasonable women. Women who can handle things. Women who don’t create unnecessary problems. Women who know when something is appropriate and when it isn’t.

There is nothing wrong with any of those things. But there is also something delicious about an evening when none of them matter very much.

Halloween creates a little space outside ordinary life. For a few hours, you can exaggerate. You can be theatrical. You can wear something you would never normally dare to wear. You can explore the part of yourself that is less polite, less predictable and perhaps a little more dangerous.

Not because you want to become a bad person.

Because playing with darkness can be fun when you know you can take the crown off again tomorrow morning.

And perhaps that is why I don’t imagine my Vampire Queen screaming, chasing anyone or covered in blood.

She doesn’t need to.

Her power is much quieter than that.

If I Became a Vampire Queen This Halloween

I already know exactly what I would do.

I would choose the largest black crown in the collection. If I’m going to become a vampire after waiting this many years, I am certainly not going to choose subtlety now. I would wear it with a black wig, a long black lace dress, the necklace and earrings, and definitely the finger claws. I might add the lace mask if the whole look could still carry it without becoming too much — although my personal definition of too much on Halloween is admittedly quite generous.

The makeup would be dramatic but still beautiful: strong black eyeliner, red lips and perhaps a small trail of artificial blood from the corner of my mouth. Enough to tell the story, not enough to turn me into a horror film.

And I would take her somewhere worthy of the effort. A beautiful Halloween party. A masquerade ball. Ideally an old castle, because if I have spent this much time becoming an immortal queen, I would at least like the architecture to cooperate.

That is the balance I wanted in this collection from the beginning. Dark, but not ugly. Dangerous, but still beautiful. Dramatic without becoming grotesque.

I don’t want you to look frightening.

I want you to look irresistible.

You Don’t Need the Entire Collection to Become Her

And if your version of Vampire Queen is quieter than mine, that is completely fine.

You don’t need the largest crown, every piece of jewellery and ten finger claws to make the character work. If I were creating the look on a smaller budget, I would start with a Vampire Queen tiara and choker necklace. Together they frame the face and bring in those burgundy blood-drop details that immediately establish the visual language of the character.

Add a black dress, beautiful hair and strong makeup, and you already have the foundation.

For a masquerade ball, I would add one of the lace masks. If you want more drama, choose one of the larger crowns and bring in the earrings or finger claws. And if, like me, you have absolutely no interest in behaving sensibly once Halloween arrives, build the entire look.

The question isn’t how many pieces you need.

It is how far you want to take the transformation.

I Don’t Want You to Admire My Crown

When I imagine the woman who eventually wears one of these pieces, there is one particular moment I keep returning to.

The party hasn’t started yet.

Her makeup is finished. Her dress is on. She fastens the necklace, puts on the earrings and finally places the crown on her head.

Then she looks into the mirror.

And this is important: I don’t want her first thought to be, “What a beautiful crown.”

I want her to think: “I look incredible.”

That difference is everything to me.

The crown has done its job when she stops thinking about the object and starts seeing herself differently.

I want her to feel like a dark queen. A femme fatale. The woman people will notice when she walks into the room. I want her to be excited about the attention instead of apologising for it. I want her to know she could have bought a simple costume, but instead she decided that this year she was going to do it properly.

And then I want her to go to the party and enjoy every second of it.

Take too many photographs.

Accept every compliment.

Be dramatic.

Be slightly wicked.

Enjoy being looked at.

Tomorrow she can go back to being responsible.

Tonight she is immortal.

The Costume Lasts One Night. The Memory Can Last for Years.

There is something wonderfully irrational about Halloween when you think about it.

We can spend weeks planning something we will wear for only a few hours. We search for the right dress, struggle with wigs, spend an hour doing makeup, make things, buy things and apparently purchase several sets of vampire teeth that ultimately end up in the bin.

And then the evening is over.

But I don’t think we remember our lives according to how many hours something lasted.

We remember moments.

Ten years from now, perhaps one of my customers will find an old photograph. Maybe it appears in her phone memories or she scrolls far enough back through Instagram to find herself standing there in black lace, red lipstick and an enormous crown.

Her life may be completely different by then.

But for a moment she will remember the room. The music. Her friends. The compliments. How ridiculous the claws were when she tried to hold a drink. How long it took her to get ready.

And hopefully she will look at herself and think:

God, I looked incredible. That was such a good night.

That is ultimately what I hope my work becomes part of.

Yes, I make crowns. I make masks, necklaces, earrings and claws. Those are the objects that leave my atelier.

But what I really want to create is the possibility of a moment.

One evening when you allow yourself to become someone else. One entrance people remember. One photograph you still love ten years later.

And if you spend the rest of the year being the good girl, perhaps Halloween is exactly the right night to discover your darker queen.

Choose how far you want to take the transformation — and become her for one unforgettable night.