This collection is rooted in gilded opulence, the delicacy and resilience of nature. Glistening threads and gold leaf speak to a long-lost Byzantine world, made modern in reductive volumes, unfurled across meters of silken cloth—painted by hand, felted by hand, spun and embroidered by hand. Bursts of color illuminate outerwear, evoking the organic beauty of a painter’s palette. Gilded strings weave across cloqué, in dialogue with lurex tweed and sequined cashmere that catches the light. 

Visions crystallize in the dawn, bright spots glimmer across the moving mist, bringing free-spirited elegance to dotted fil coupé and lace that unveils the body. Petals unfurl toward the sun, blooming across Italian trench and draped velvet. Beauty preserved in its fragility. Ephemera captured for the ages.

The Act of Dressing

Rachel Cusk for Ulla Johnson

Being able to create ourselves has felt like the greatest, the final privilege. For years we have created other things, we have pushed so as to create them. We have risked health and happiness, order, security. But now that we’ve decided to create ourselves, now that we have the leisure and the capacity to consider our own health and happiness, we can take a different attitude to these risks. We can refuse to do certain things, or decide to do them differently. After all this time, we can choose. Each day is completely unknown to us, just as our creations were unknown before we made them. When we made our creations a spirit possessed us, a set of instincts that were as precise and exacting as scientific laws. We understood this science almost unconsciously, we subjected ourselves to its rigour, and when we were finished we felt empty and exhausted, as though after a night of passion or nightmares or sleepwalking. It was as though we had deserted our own conscious minds, and the return to consciousness afterwards was often painful and strange. It has proved slightly difficult to bring this mechanism to the creation of ourselves. We find it is difficult to care about ourselves in the way we cared about our creations. Often we don’t know what to do, how to occupy ourselves. Then at other times we’re very busy and the idea of creating ourselves seems less important. But suddenly we find it is there, the question. Who are we? Yet everyone else seems to know who we are.

When our children were little we would dress them. They would hold up their arms for us to pull an item of clothing over their head. They would shoot their arms straight up in the air and hold them there. The arms would go into the sleeves and for a moment their head and face were muffled in the garment. We would wiggle and pull and then their head would appear again through the neck. Their cheeks would be red, their hair slightly unruly, they would be laughing. They always found it funny, this moment when their head was inside the garment. They thought they had disappeared and then come back again, like a magic trick. They held up their arms trustingly, waiting to be made to disappear. Sometimes we feel there is no one in the whole world we could trust like that, no one who could dress us, no one who could make us disappear and then come back again. We would like someone to dress us in this way.

In Conversation: Julie Hamisky

Hamisky’s work continues the trajectory set by her grandparent Claude Lalanne’s practice of electroplating, rooted in the natural world. Her work features flower and fauna; and in this commission she has worked with Ulla Johnson’s choice of flowers, celebrating her passion for handcraft and the natural world.