Di Petsa (Q2919)
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Di Petsa is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Di Petsa |
Di Petsa is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
When Cretan princess Ariadne hatched a plan to kill the labyrinth-dwelling Minotaur with her lover Theseus, she bestowed him with a ball of thread, so he could lead himself from the maze after completing the murderous deed. This got Athens-based Dimitra Petsa—whose Greek mythology-exploring collections draw on Persephone's transformation into the queen of the underworld and the homecoming of Odysseus—to thinking about the symbol of the horned Minotaur, half-human, half-bull, as a reflection of the shadow and light that exist within women. If our body is a complex labyrinth, then for Petsa, the thread that will lead us through darkness for spring 2025 is female self-pleasure. “It’s a concept that has always been viewed as very low-brow, but people don’t give value to the divine power that it has,” she said.Frustrated by the polarizing Madonna-whore complex bestowed on women, or the medicalized and sexualized binaries they are restricted by, Petsa has used her catwalk to give center stage to societally hidden pregnant bodies since she launched her brand in 2019, using her signature wet-look illusion dresses to emphasize bulging bumps. For spring she doubled down on taboos associated with the female body: a skintight mini-dress featured a lactating nipple print; skimpy red-tinged bikini bottoms evoked the stains of menstruation blood; draped mesh trousers in dégradé blues and turquoises appeared as if drenched in bodily fluid; "masturbation denim,” included low-rise jeans with a distressed triangular pocket at the crotch. “They’re designed to look like they've been really rubbed,” Petsa said with a smile.The self-pleasure theme of the collection took shape out of the disintegration of Petsa’s long-term relationship. “I was living in turbulence, and the only lifeboat was my vagina,” the designer said, discussing the role her own body took as an anchor. As a result of the break-up, she reconnected with her male friends, considering how menswear rarely explores “the divinity of clothing” and the potency it can impress onto the body. Spring saw a solid expansion into daring menswear: body-sculpting pleated shirting and wet-look tracksuits; crotch-emphasizing “hard-on” denim, plus a metal codpiece and talismanic nipple jewels, which a handcraft-obsessed Petsa made herself.With a degree in performance art, Petsa often incorporates herself into her body-diverse theatrical shows, through live music or a poetry recital.
For spring she instead played a theatrical voice of god (correction: goddess!), pre-recording an invocation to self-pleasure that boomed across the catwalk. Models gestured with blood-stained fingers and rouged mouths, mimicked Minotaur horns with their hands, and walked with sand-stained hair and tan line-stained bodies as if straight from a sordid romp on the beach. As a final choreographed tableau, a topless male model wrapped the other inclusive bodies on the catwalk with a blood red ball of yarn, each navigating their own internal labyrinth, where masturbation is not maligned, but mythologized.
13 September 2024
While Dimitra Petsa’s designs celebrate the female physique through body-conscious creations, they often draw inspiration from mythology. For Di Petsa’s fall collection, she channeled divine feminine archetypes such as Venus, the goddess of love, and the Virgin Mary. “Exploring the contrasts of the female experience, I looked into the ‘Madonna-whore complex’, where female sexuality is both exploited and revered,” Petsa shared. “Despite societal stigmas, I view female sexuality as something pure, divine, and, in a sense, healing.”Petsa is known for staging live performances and integrating herself into her runway presentations. This season, she orchestrated a ceremonial procession embodying female goddesses adorned in beautifully draped garments that accentuated the models’ forms. At the top of the runway, Flora Yin Wong mesmerized the audience with live Guzheng music while Petsa recited Greek poetry, creating an immersive experience heightened by the cleansing chimes of bells and wafts of incense. Describing the concept, she explained, “It was an imagined ritual exploring themes of love, seduction, visibility, and unity with one’s beloved—a tapestry of emotions surrounding romantic connections.”The initial series of looks showcased all-white ensembles, featuring shades of ivory, bone, and cream. Among them were boned corsets revealing a single breast, sheer coats adorned with cotton discards for a feathery effect, and asymmetrical tops. Notably, Petsa’s infamous “wet look” dress underwent a transformation, revealing a pregnant model’s stomach while elegantly maintaining its signature skin-clinging allure. Two brides made a striking appearance, one in a tiered satin suit and the other in an off-the-shoulder satin gown. The show took an intriguing turn as a pair of models, both clad in sheer nude gowns, dashed towards each other on the runway, with one seamlessly merging into the other’s stretch mesh dress, symbolizing a union of two individuals into one.As the show progressed, the performances took a step back, and the colors in the lineup intensified. This included cobalt blue leather pants, liquid jersey dresses, and a burgundy leather mini dress with mesh inserts. Denim crop tops and jeans briefly graced the stage before the collection shifted its focus to all-black leather pieces, ranging from strapless dresses to cut-out gowns with lace-up details, as well as jackets and underwear sets.
The finale featured a seductive, skin-baring midnight blue dress adorned with talismanic stones across the chest, which the model wore along with a silver embellished netted veil. Petsa understands how to harness her distinct aesthetic, maintaining familiar silhouettes while innovating with fresh ideas and fabrications.
19 February 2024
Dimitra Petsa’s spring collection explored the notion of love. But it wasn’t anything to do with the unconditional type from parents—it was about the intricate journey of self-love and coping with the complexities of adult relationships, including love’s inevitable losses and the healing that follows. She looked to her heritage for inspiration from ancient Greek mythology—in particular the goddess Aphrodite. “In culture and films she’s depicted as a hyper-sexualized deity, but if you read deeper into her experiences, they are full of hardships and emotions in a very human way,” the designer said at a preview.The show, held at the Old Selfridges Hotel, began with a performance depicting the birth of Aphrodite, emerging from the ocean. A model, initially semi-nude, was surrounded by dancers in white halter-neck dresses symbolizing the sea’s waves, with Petsa herself among them. As the dance unfolded, the Aphrodite figure was then gracefully propelled down the runway to embark on a metaphorical journey of life. Petsa elaborated, “It represents the way one’s body becomes increasingly sexualized as you grow up, thrusting you out into the world to experience and discover self-love.”The mood embodied a goddess fantasy with cut-out dresses of varying lengths and lashings of gold details throughout. Hand-knitted cream seafoam-inspired minidresses created an alluring, disheveled-yet-refined look from cotton offcuts. A coral off-the-shoulder minidress with a draped, ruched skirt was particularly striking. Elsewhere, gold lamé draped the body with peekaboos, fashioning seductive dresses.Previously, Petsa explored concepts surrounding the pregnant body and its symbolic meanings. She crafted a pregnant belly from clay for spring, designed to hold wine and equipped with handles, reminiscent of a Greek vase. Petsa explained, “It revolves around the idea of feeding your own self-growth and being pregnant with yourself.”As the show progressed, the idea of breaking and healing was depicted through the garments—“like piecing back a broken heart,” said Petsa. Form-fitting gowns in ivory and nude featured cut outs with lace-up details on the sides and back, emulating corsetry, as well as a Greek statue wrapped in fabric and string for cargo shipping. A hand-drawn graphic of the body was digitally printed onto waist-cinching column dresses made from bamboo fabric.
Petsa’s enduring wet-look dresses, a long-time and often-imitated signature, here took the form of two-piece sets with low-slung maxi skirts and off-the-shoulder gowns featuring extreme thigh-high slits. As a whole, Petsa is confidently finding her stride and expanding her repertoire without compromising her design language.
15 September 2023
Inspired by her Greek heritage and its ancient mythologies, Dimitra Petsa looked to the story of Persephone for fall. For those unfamiliar: She was the daughter of the goddess Demeter, who was abducted by Hades, and then later became the queen of the underworld. With the collection, titled Breaking and Healing, the designer wanted to honor the growth and transformation that Persephone has experienced.Petsa started the show with a guided meditation in the pitch black show space of the Old Selfridges Hotel, narrating it herself from a superimposed rock structure as though the audience members were Persephone embarking on her voyage into the underworld. As the show progressed, her delivery became more emotive, even to the point of pouring wine-like substance all over herself. “I wanted to set the tone right—even if the theme seems moodier than usual, in order to heal and grow, you have to go through the darkness,” the designer said in a preview. “The darkness becomes the light.”When it came to honing in on her signatures, Petsa was on her A-game—whether it was her popular wet-look illusion dresses, which have been elevated in Lycra and silks in dark hues, or the placements of healing crystals like clear quartz—to encourage “tenderness, and letting go”—as decorative features on dress straps and headdresses. Elsewhere, paneled leather and velvet were sensuously placed like mosaics on mesh dresses, a new technique for the brand.In a continuation from last season, Petsa developed new twists on maternity styles, only this time, certain pieces were designed for those who want to be “pregnant with themselves,” via corseted hand-embroidered bumps. Knitted denim separates with frayed panels inserted vertically also stood out as a strong moment. For the finale, she showed a cut-out silk chiffon dress that featured corset boning wings, a silhouette that elevated (quite literally) her ethereal sensibilities.
17 February 2023
“It’s about self-exploration and healing, as well as thinking of a more esoteric way to create a body of work,” mused Dimitra Petsa after the screening of her latest collection’s accompanying film,The Moon Tastes of Wine. “Where does artistic impulse come from? Why is there not one clear route to achieving success in creativity?”The film itself—which was written and directed by Petsa, and lensed by Petros Ioannidis—took inspiration from the Dionysian Mysteries, an ancient Greek and Roman ritual involving intoxicants and trance-inducing methods to liberate individuals to get to their most carefree and natural state. Shot in Athens, near Petsa’s hometown of Rafina, the film starts off with its protagonist, played by Belgian actor Aurora Marion, struggling with writer’s block. Eventually the scenes spiral into a frenzy, in which each character ends up releasing their inhibitions and dancing away their anguish, while wearing an array of body-conscious Di Petsa creations.The clothes were a celebration of all the stages of growth, from child to parent, while introducing new techniques to Petsa’s signatures. There was a sky blue beaded minidress that took two months to construct: The details were of couture-level meticulousness. A delicately draped caftan attached to a gold chain around the neck felt particularly strong. Children’s-wear was included too. It came in the form of matching mother-daughter swimwear sets covered in a new print, inspired by ancient Greek terra-cotta pottery washed up by the sea (the print was also used on slinky slip dresses).The wet-look, Greek goddess–inspired Illusion dress—one of Petsa’s best-selling items since launching her label in 2021—was elevated in new iterations, including a white strapless version that revealed a baby bump and a striking pink floor-length gown embellished with healing rose quartz crystals and glass beads.Petsa, who made an appearance in the film, remarked, “I find it frustrating when the female body is either sexualized or medicalized—there is no narrative in between. Empowering women is of the utmost importance to me.”
20 September 2022
Dimitra Petsa’s clothing is all about the female form, and rather than change her ideas for the seasons of the year, she changes her design tack to better suit the seasons of a woman’s life. Pregnancy and all its stages was her inspiration for fall 2022, specifically the myth of Persephone and the relationship between a mother and daughter. “When she was with her mother, Demeter, she was a daughter,” Petsa says, “but when she was in the underworld she was a queen.”That spooky regality plays well with Petsa’s aesthetic, her sensual sirens slinking about in wet look dresses and revealing corsetry. But for every exciting aesthetic note Petsa hits—and there are many—she is also a designer who truly considers and cares for a woman’s body. This season the vast majority of the collection is designed to be worn during and after pregnancy. Corsets and trousers unclasp at the nipple and the waist to allow for breastfeeding or a growing mid-section, and most tops are structured to work for Hot Girl Summer or New Mom Spring, with straps, folds, and drapery built in to work for breastfeeding.To other designers, the changes of a woman’s body are a nuisance, but to this designer, they are a raison d’être. “I am so interested in the way a woman’s body inflates and deflates, I really wanted to have clothes that accommodate these changes,” she says. But for every smart and gracious choice she makes to accommodate a woman’s life, she is also thinking about the environment and protecting traditions. Her materials are mostly dead stock or recycled and she engaged Greece’s oldest pleating studio to make a new kind of long slinky Fortuny pleat à la Petsa. For a designer with such a specific taste, her collection has the potential to break boundaries about what clothing can do and how it should be made.
1 March 2022
Much of mainstream fashion wants what Dimitra Petsa has—just look at the many major designers cribbing her wet-look, Greek-goddess aesthetic. But if 2020’s lockdowns and fashion’s subsequent recalibration has taught us anything, it’s that emotion can’t be faked and a new generation of fashion lovers and customers are looking for a personal connection to their clothing. That’s why women like Gigi Hadid, Yseult, and Rina Sawayama are lining up for Petsa’s custom garments.Her ready-to-wear, presented at Paris Fashion Week for the first time as a guest of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, contains the same level of passion and fury as her one-off gowns. The proof isn’t only in the sensitive way she drapes her jersey to cradle the bosom, slide down the hips, or pool on the ground around the wearer’s ankles—she describes her process both as “the body emerging from something” and as a method of “accentuating the naked body, not covering it up”—but in the many women from Greece and the U.K. who went to Paris to help make Petsa’s vision real.Zooming together at around 11 p.m. in Paris, all the lights are on in a small French apartment and women are rushing about everywhere. Long-haired friends step in and out of the frame, torsos swaying and bums held taut in knit maxiskirts, gleefully modeling Petsa’s new collection. Others hold up cell-phone flashlights to further show off the minute craftsmanship of each piece, with seams tailored to gently swoop around a body’s curves. In the background another group is sitting on the floor, working away.“I feel like a lot of designers, with Fashion Week coming back, have this idea of ‘let’s party,’” Petsa says. “But I still think a lot of people are apprehensive about touching each other again, about seeing each other again.” She’s called her collection Nostos-Touch; the touch part is obvious, representing the idea of wanting to be embraced but being wary of its consequences.Nostosis Greek for “homecoming,” sort of like Odysseus after a long journey through the Mediterranean.Petsa is less concerned with the trials of that mythic man and more with the Sirens he finds along the way. She tapped into this darker side of femininity, the idea of mermaids caught in nets, of constraint and dangerous freedom, with a moody palette of cobalt, navy, burgundy, and gold.
Even with its complicated drapery and cutouts, this collection is her most wearable offering yet, made from cotton jersey and Tencel and adorned with custom marine blue rings, bracelets, and necklaces.At Paris Fashion Week, the Petsa Poseidonesses came together in a performance centered around the musician Lola Lolita. Models writhed, swayed, and lay down while Lolita commanded the ceremony. Petsa says she wants to move away from Western perceptions of Greek culture. Even those with a long memory and long scholarship of ancient cultures may be hard-pressed to remember the pre-Greeks, but many of those who do have hypothesized that the earliest cultures on the Peloponnesus were matriarchal. One hopes Petsa’s customers are willing to join her on this journey through time and womanhood—but if not, these are still some of the most beautiful sexy dresses and separates this season.
13 October 2021