In a requiem for an unembodied existential projection, Ukrainian designer Irina Dzhus translates ‘patterns into patterns’, converting grief into avant-garde. Having previously escaped the war and a family abuse experience, she has stumbled upon a seemingly safe personal life situation. That turned into a macabre rendezvous with her most sacred fears. Forced to turn on the familiar survival mode, the artist exploited her creative power as an urgent coping mechanism.
Premiered at Berlin Fashion Week, the “ABSOLUTE” act is now placed at the conceptual Jaga Hupało Space of Creationin Warsaw and attributed with objects by local design visionaries, Zieta Studio, Anna Drozd-Tutaj, and Organic Lighting. At the centre stage, framed with a cube construction, stands a chair, as a starting point for a profound insight. Instead of music, Irina Dzhus tells her story. Link by link, she unveils a sequence of events, dialogues and sensations that have led her to the agonising animation of unexperienced absolute happiness. The silhouettes are naïvely structured as Irina Dzhus refers to modernist comics and spiritualistic motifs. She freezes her memories within transformable outfits, replaying them in a loop mode.
Focused on accessories as an eloquent medium in the true events, Irina shapes her sculptural apparel from pre- owned headpieces and scarves. Alongside the upcycling kintsugi homage, anatomical metaphors reflect on fetishes and phobias. The imagery includes mouths, either smoking or ritualistically stitched, a hybrid of a deconstructed male face and an aged female corpus. And a garment wearable as long as 2 giant gloves hold each other. A men’s coat with an inbuilt embracing figure portrays Irina Dzhus’ obsessive correlation with the protagonist. This semi- supernatural, blindingly luminous outline became indivisible from the artist’s identity. A mirroring indicator of her very existence, both a euphoric dream and a paralysing dystopia.
The “ABSOLUTE” project turned out to be life-determining for Irina Dzhus. This rebellious explosion of ideas on the ground of sorrow and helplessness has vividly shown her she would never lose her creative force, no matter how tragic circumstances. Realisation of this ‘blessing-slash-doom’ foundation of her very personality, imprisoning her within a duty, made the artist question the freedom of choice, not just in terms of strategies, but life itself. Materialisedback in early 2024, the collection has established DZHUS’ cathartic creativity vector. Since, the brand has been developing a declarative audiovisual campaign that it now unveils.
DZHUS creates multi-purpose outfits from cruelty-free materials and has gained international recognition as a Ukrainian conceptual fashion brand. Designer Irina Dzhus’ pattern-making innovations help minimise physical shopping and create a versatile yet sustainable wardrobe from a few transformable garments. Since the war began, DZHUS has relocated to the EU and has been donating 30% of its profit to Ukrainian animal rights organisations. In 2019, DZHUS won the Cruelty-free Fashion prize at Best Fashion Awards Ukraine. Short-listed for the International Woolmark Prize back in 2015. DZHUS now stocks its collections at concept stores across Japan, China, Belgium, Portugal, the USA, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Australia, and Poland, and sells online to customers worldwideDZHUS incorporates gender representation dilemmas in the core of its unisex design, challenging the social standards and glorifying human physique in its versatility.
