Between Helena Stölting's disgust and fascination

Helena Stölting is a young designer, graduated in fashion designer at the Universität Der Künste Berlin, one of the Berlin universities that was born at the end of the 1600s and immediately specialized in the study of artistic and creative subjects.

From a visual scenario that recalls the lava of volcanoes, mud and slime, Helena’s reflection on fashion is born. Its fashion. So what’s the beauty? What is still able to give us emotion, immersed as we are in the supreme vortex of stimuli that the Internet gives us?

Perhaps the only emotions we still feel, in an almost primordial way and not controlled or foreseen, are the horror and disgust. Or at least, this is how the designer must have thought when she decided to place attention at the center of her creative process for that deadlock in which, looking at something strange and different, we perceive that sense of indecision between disgust and charm. And in an indefinite instant we perceive both of them, as the dead life (or living death, as you prefer) of Schrödinger’s cat.

Liquids, according to Helena, are among the first elements capable of generating this sensation that moves between disgust and fascination. The designer will therefore concentrate on bringing them back into fashion: all of her garments are like this, made of actually solid material but which recalls in all respects a dense liquid, piled up in shapes that are not very harmonious to the eye, as happens with mud or a dense volcanic and shapeless mass.

The material is assembled without rules, in a rough way to form once a heel, once a handle of a bag and so on.

You say “it has to do with the appropriation and aestheticization of disgust”, in which the impulse of attraction and that of repulsion play a significant role. They are emotions.

The starting point of his work is the observation of all those bodily phenomena that leave us dumbfounded, disgusted, with the desire to look away and quickly place it elsewhere. These emotions express nothing but fear of the different and the stranger.

In a society that produces products that make our fluids invisible and that continues to show itself to us as a purely male chauvinist, in which the only liquids we are allowed to talk about are sperm, sweat and tears, Helena Stölting’s collection intends be a means to deepen the bond between oneself and the most intimate part of oneself. The link between ‘us’ that we make visible to anyone is ‘us’, the part under the clothes, the part that nobody sees.

By destroying the preconceptions, abstract and visual, through almost artistic plastic creations, the designer’s garments encounter fashion in the most general form of the term, but completely re-invent the categories of material and color. The bag is always the bag.

The shoe is always a shoe. But the way in which the color is conceived (a thickened mass of multicolored grains that create a discontinuous pattern) and the material (conceived as mud–like or semi–transparent surface) is completely new and more ‘artistic‘ than fashionable.

These pieces are an artistic medium that bring what is internal, secret and hidden into the open and make it, finally, present to the world.

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Rachele Lisci

Rachele Lisci, anche nota come Chiusoperferie, è una stylist, blogger e giornalista italiana. Appassionata di arte e cultura, ama il cinema e cantare a squarciagola i The Smiths.