Culture / Events / Fashion house - 12/9/21
Artist and Couturier Michaela Stark will unveil an exhibition of her latest designs at 3537, the cultural center masterminded by Dover Street Market, from December 5th until December 19th in collaboration with photographer Solve Sundsbo.
Michaela's body of work revolves around liberating the body from conventional beauty norms. Stark plays with the balance of beauty and grotesque, sometimes forcing the body into such extreme shapes that are based off idealized beauty norms. Through her references of classical beauty, she is almost poking fun at the lengths that we go to adhere to this idealized look.
Stark reshapes the human body through her body morphing process. She uses her skills acquired as a seamstress to manipulate the body, allowing us to see perceived flaws as beautiful, turning them into a fantasy, creating art as an extension of her practice. Masterful in her craft and game changing vision, employing the same tools that couturiers used in the past to hide imperfections, Stark uses them to accentuate and challenge traditional standards serving a greater purpose than just personal attire.
Stark’s practice began as she started experimenting on her own body, in her spare time. Documenting her design process led to images that are part performance, part fashion experiments, which together form a larger artistic project.
“Stark Naked” will be the first time that Michaela Stark has shown her couture lingerie.
The collection is inspired by her fascination with flesh and skin. Michaela often models her own pieces, and has squeezed her body into extreme corsetry many times – sometimes just for fun experiments and other times for photo shoots and performances. In doing so, Michaela will always document how her skin reacts to being constricted so much – how the skin folds, the red marks and indents left on the skin, bruising, and even the occasional pin prick that she gives herself in the draping process.
The couture lingerie pieces from her “Stark Naked” collection are designed to look like the skin, or bodily growths as an extension of the skin. They are each one-of-a-kind pieces, made of invisible tulle, grosgrain ribbon and silk chiffon and organza that has been treated and hand dyed to look like skin, and match the model’s unique flesh tone. They each have intricate hand embroidery, some embellished with Swarovski pearls.
The lingerie is about honouring and celebrating each individual’s body, and required multiple fittings over six months on her muses Jade ‘O’ Belle & Dodo Potato. It is designed to fit the curves exactly, and is inspired by their personal relationship with their body. Michaela always begins by talking to her clients, to hear what they have to say about their body, their desires, their insecurities etc.
The collaborative process is essential to her work. This is her second collaboration with Solve Sundsbo. Part of the concept was actually inspired by one of Solve’s images of her from a previous shoot. Michaela had constricted and wrapped her entire body for one image more intensely than she had ever done before. In the photo taken immediately after this, Michaela put on a tulle sheer corset that did not hide any of the red, raw marks on her skin. Solve captured this so beautifully, that it looked like the red marks were intentional in the photograph, and intensified the beauty to the body.
For “Stark Naked”, Solve took this concept further with Michaela, and photographed the garments and the skin in a way that enhanced it.
They intentionally, did not retouch the skin of the models, the hair stubble, the stretch marks, the natural red marks, making the skin look very raw and real. Kevin Cordo, the makeup artist on set, enhanced this idea even further by accentuating these marks, bruises and texture with special makeup treatment.
Together they created a beautiful body of work that not only pays homage to Michaela’s study of the body, shape, and idealized beauty standards – but that pushed that further to propose a new idea of beauty, making you question your very own perceptions of perfection.
Credits:
Photographer: Zoe Natale Mannella
Hair: Akemi Kishida
Make up: Vanessa Bellini
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