She Came Out of the Water: Di Petsa and the ‘Wet Trend’
As Di Petsa experiments with new elements in her latest heat-reactive collection, THREADS writer Benedetta first dives into the Greecian designer’s iconic shape of water…
Having already bewitched Lizzo, Kylie Jenner, Gigi Hadid and Megan Fox, among others, Athens-born designer Dimitra “Di” Petsa is dedicatedly carving out her unique place in the fashion world. Her power? Turning bodily fluids into art, giving water a shape and tactility.
Simultaneously liquid and carnal, her collections explore sexuality, nudity, motherhood, and wetness through clothes that are designed for all body types, celebrating their fluctuating existence and inner flowing power. A holy union between skin, flesh, and water. And also between innovation and traditional craftsmanship.
The designer had to put in many hours of hard work to achieve the intricate draping technique, which was also informed by the rich embroidery tradition of her motherland. The result is a groundbreaking — or water parting — series of garments, including breastfeeding tops and maternity wear, dedicated entirely to self-discovery, femininity, and love; specifically self-love.
“Every form of love exists within you — platonic love, sexual love, maternal love, friendship, anything,” she told British Vogue. “Not only are there forms of love available for you to give to others, but to supply to yourself, too.”
This could be seen as an encouragement to all women, and a gentle invitation to cheer and raise a glass for every tear both shed and withheld. For every death and every birth. For every piece of self flowed out, and every piece flowed in.
Looking at the history of fashion, Di Petsa is clearly not the first designer to have taken up the challenge of achieving the wet look. Already an iconic staple of haute couture, for instance, is the Thierry Mugler dress created for and worn by Kim Kardashian at the 2019 Met Gala, apparently inspired by Sophia Loren's wet dress in Boy on a Dolphin (1957). It turned the celebrity into an Armenian Venus birthed by the Aegean sea, her whole body dripping in gems resembling droplets of water.
“Every form of love exists within you — platonic love, sexual love, maternal love, friendship, anything”
And before Mugler, going back to the 1980s, it’s impossible not to mention John Galliano’s Fallen Angels collection: models wearing diaphanous muslin tunics, walking on the runaway completely drenched in water. The inspiration and story behind it was the so-called 'muslin sickness,' a disease that allegedly killed thousands of French women in the late 18th century. According to the myth, the culprit behind all those deaths (in reality caused by a much more probable combination of cold weather and pneumonia) was a new fashion trend born after the French Revolution: attention-seekers leaving their homes wearing wet muslin camisoles. A not-so-subtle warning to all women that frivolous fashion can equal death.
However, even though fashion designers have been fascinated with water and wetness for many years, Di Petsa’s take on the trend is anything but trite; instead signalling what deep, radical changes the industry has been undergoing.
Unlike Mugler’s tight-fitting, curve-enhancing creation (Kim K herself described the experience of wearing the corseted dress as extremely painful), her clothes do not restrain or contain; wetness for the designer is about freedom, fluidity of expression and being. She acknowledges with staggering honesty that humans secret sweat, not pearls. And that there is a raw, precious beauty in that too.
Unlike Galliano, she does not need to splash water on her models. Di Petsa has made the most out of the traditional techniques of the Lyceum Club of Greek Women, and her productive time as a student of Performance Design and Practice at Central Saint Martin. She creates fabrics that become a second, liquid skin, naturally enhancing and breathing in rhythm with the bodies that pulsate underneath.
“Unlike Mugler’s tight-fitting, curve-enhancing creation [...] her clothes do not restrain or contain; wetness for the designer is about freedom, fluidity of expression and being.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, considering the designer's origins as well as the long-established bond between art history and fashion, the wet look also seems to be a nod to Ancient Greek sculpture and folklore. Looking at the white dress worn by Gigi Hadid for her pregnancy photoshoot, for instance, it is quite easy to draw a comparison with the famous Venus of Milo.
More recently, her Fall/Winter 2022 collection, Mother Persephone is an ode to the goddess who was simultaneously the queen of the underworld and the only daughter of Demeter, goddess of agriculture: fertility and motherhood co-existing with the disruptive forces of the body. A woman that is not defined exclusively by her power to give birth to other beings, but also by her power to give birth to her own self (or selves).
Dimitra Petsa seeks to celebrate, and inundate with love, the complexity and vulnerability of these exposed, naked bodies; a vulnerability that, as the designer points out, does not equal powerlessness, the same way nudity is not necessarily aimed at satisfying someone else's pleasure. The exposed breasts of a mother feeding her child, for instance, are not meant to capture lascivious gazes; they remain liquid moments belonging to no one but Mother and Child.
Maybe the designer is trying to remind us that there is humanity in water, and water in all of us. Hopefully, she will be paving the way for a generation of young, ambitious designers who will keep on challenging themselves and their audiences, bringing the scorching primality of more elemental forces, and femininity itself, into the fashion world.
“Maybe the designer is trying to remind us that there is humanity in water, and water in all of us.”
If we all come from water, perhaps to water we all shall return.