Athenian designer and performance artist Dimitra Petsa's first collection, Wetness, consists of clothes which all appear to be drenched in sweat or pee, but are actually dry. The collection was part of her graduate MA show at Central Saint Martins and for it she had to come up with a special technique in order to make her dresses look soaking wet, dye sweat stains on T-shirts and created hand-blown glass nipple piercings in the shape of milk drops.
Dimitra is currently working on a sequel, Wetness Chapter 2: a collection of unconventional and bold maternity garments. After investigating the relationship between bodily fluids and shame, Dimitra now focuses her work on the archetypal roles of women within society. We sat down with her to talk about wetting yourself, the censorship of nipples on Instagram and her new collection.
i-D: I heard that you wet yourself in public in real life before starting work on for your first collection. Could you tell me a bit more about that?
Dimitra Petsa: Haha, that’s true. It wasn’t an accident however, it was part of my performance art. I did a BA in performance art before enrolling in the Fashion Design MA. I’m very interested in how our emotions are connected to the fluids in our bodies: sadness connects to tears, arousal to vaginal fluid, nervousness to sweat. After my research, I felt a need to do something with this. So that’s when I decided to pee my pants in public, in a crowded subway in Athens.
To me, that was the ultimate metaphor for letting go -- both of my bodily fluids and of my shame. That’s how I finally came up with my first design: a pair of pants which are dyed in such a way that it seems someone peed in them. As a matter of fact, I got the models to wet themselves as well during the presentation of my collection.
