Dzhus

Hi Mila and the METAL community, thanks a lot for having me. Dzhus has been a sharply personal project for all the 14 years of its existence, yet it’s since the last few seasons that I’ve incorporated the cathartic component in its DNA. Being the brand’s very core myself, its toolkit and missionary, I have a duty to deliver genuine messages through its imagery, responding to inconvenient questions within topics I find most relevant. In this respect, we serve each other: I maintain its vital power and dedicate my entire source to it, whatever my private circumstances. In return, it provides me with space for reflections.
Having escaped the war comparatively smoothly, I’ve experienced extremely traumatic circumstances in my personal life. Industry-bound, with no chance to take an urged pause, I’ve conveyed my struggle, in all its multi-layered hypostasis, in 3 collections, Thesaurus, Absolute, and Anticon, as I went through the fazes of my mutating condition.

I believe I must declare an open statement here, addressed to fellow creatives and fashion consumers. Not only have I not gained any progress in the brand’s establishment, business-wise, over the years, but I have reached the critical point upon the last 4 seasons of nonstop show production. As a sole player on behalf of a brand with a dominant conceptual aspect, I had to multitask on the edge of the imaginable, even though my intimate universe had been ruined with grief.
Moreover, the years of full self-dedication to delivering the shows on the international scale have resulted in empty accounts due to neglected commercial opportunities and abandoned marketing assets. Along with being offered numerous showcase opportunities worldwide since my evacuation, I was incredibly honoured to have won the Berlin Fashion Week grant 4 times in a row. However, it was only this season when I wasn’t selected that I felt sincere joy about the contest results! The PR perspectives were too precious and the production funding too generous to just stop applying, so I did need external circumstances to finally start recollecting my life. The first thing I did was finishing all the garment samples, matching the eye-catching looks with the quality they deserved. The truth is that whatever effort I had contributed was never enough and every showcase came out as a cluster of fuckups, covered with a convincing façade.
Today I’ve been literally surviving, often lacking means for everyday expenses like food or transport, upon spending everything I earn on the inevitable monthly bills. I had to return to the processes I had already managed to delegate, damping severely when no one’s watching: executing numerous technical assignments, not related to my profession, for which I’d have to pay others within the order fulfilment algorithm, to obtain a profit sufficient to cover the ongoing expenses – and I still fail.
Every day, I receive letters from followers saying, “Just never stop! The world needs your unique creativity!”, to which I want to answer with an open question: what are the actual indicators of this demand and how should I continue with no support? If you need it, buy it, or it will end for good. And ethics-wise: does a demand of the circuses and my capability of delivering those equal an obligation? What is my reward for such ascetic self-devotion? Until I know the answers, I try to steal moments from the duty for my unconditional passions, such as dancing, cooking, languages, running, or culturology.

Although rituals are essential for me as an OCD individual, I don’t follow any particular algorithm when it comes to ideas generation, simply because this process is indivisible from my very self. I exercise in just the opposite: I encourage myself when I succeed at focusing on useless things not related to my job. Disregarding potential opportunities at least there feels like a tiny portion of true luxury.

The concept of Anticon knocked on my mind when I met a person reminiscent of the antagonist from my personal drama. This hardly known figure became a strong trigger, evoking a range of paralysing flashbacks, overwhelming compulsions and, eventually, a phantasmic feeling towards, in fact, an avatar. The function of an icon in Byzantium and later Orthodox Christianity has been to represent and visualise the cherished hypostasis in order to stimulate exaltation during prayer – unlike fetishism, in which the object itself is worshiped. In this respect, a character embodying features of your anti-hero becomes the icon you project your suffering on. An anti-icon. For years, I’ve dug into the symbolic imagery of early Christianity and Gnosticism in particular, Judaism, and Kabbalah. Naturally, its eclectic interpretation within today’s metamodernist paradigm became the language to communicate my sensational experience with.

My entire creativity’s mission is to evoke questions and reflections within the relevant existential narratives. Using abstract metaphors alone, I manage to provoke associations on the edge of the conventionally accepted. Besides, all my recent shows are a desperate response to indescribable grief and agony, transferring me to insanity. As a creator by nature, I find it a default solution to declare my internal struggle via cathartic art. The brand is my fragile soul whereas I am a forever servant of its social mission. We are indivisible and therefore, I don’t choose rationally which points to accentuate and which to refrain from. Furthermore, the sharper a problem, the stronger the desire to bring it to a dialogue with my circle of kindred spirits around the world.

For sure, the authentic macrocosm with such complex correlations of elements would never have been materialised had I decided to commission the creative direction. On the other hand, considering my overall critical condition, it’s only thanks to my team that the show, eventually, happened. The cooperation process was, indeed, untypical. For instance, I had procrastinated on the choreography call, emotionally unable to handle the task, until it happened in a quasi-therapy session format: I opened up to my trusted collaborator about my private situation and, eventually, have dictated the entire detailed scenario, improvising in a nonstop monologue through tears. As the psychodrama approach seemed to be the only effective strategy to fulfil the performance, I’ve saturated it with the intimate poems I had dedicated to my disturbing relationship. Stylised in a sacramental manner, those conveyed the mystical nature of that addictive connection.

At the dawn of my practice, I started experimenting with the extended functional of garments as a pattern-making self-challenge, progressing deeper and deeper into the hidden potential of the entity’s modules, activated as they interact or switch with each other. Soon, I realised that the conceptual component behind the game had been severely underestimated. In fact, a few transformer pieces would replace a versatile wardrobe, not only saving space and funds but, most importantly, providing unlimited styling variants with a reduced environmental impact. Since, I’ve been promoting this smart alternative, coordinating it with traditional sustainable practices, among which are a made-to-order system, minimum-waste cut, local sourcing and production. For those just discovering Dzhus, I must mention that our products have always been made of cruelty-free materials. However, I don’t consider that a solution but the only acceptable approach to design and life in general.

The burden of personal values and duties is an eloquent focal point in the major religions. I’ve cultivated stoicism and self-sufficiency through the object=subject speculation that found its reflection in the multifunctional outfits.
As I deciphered my trauma, I’ve traced the roots of my horrific frustration to the nourishing ground of expectations, imposed by the society and myself. Thus, I ended up ironising the conventional symbolism throughout the entire history of mankind. I’ve also correlated self-consumerism, the modern humanity’s distinctive feature, with gastronomic religious customs. From that point, I’ve developed a grotesque autophagia concept for a series of looks, based on ritual table setting.

I got astonished and confused with the contrast between my rather stoic evacuation and the following ruination of my very identity due to a private life tragedy. Ironically enough, it seemed like the common Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder reached me over a completely unexpected cause. I’ve juxtaposed all the factors and realised that, unlike most of my countrymen, I didn’t feel homesick as I’d never been home-bound. That made me wonder what replaced the essential human urge of homecoming in my conscience, what was my surrogate to implement the settlement paradigm?
Home is something you know and trust, something waiting for you and missing you no matter the circumstances, a comfort zone you escape to when in need of protection from the hostile environment. Mine was neither a geographical spot, nor a building, but my creativity. Thus, I bear my home with me wherever I wander. I’ve defined the existential alternative derived from that discovery as self-settlement, with inter-refuge as a coping mechanism.

As I paid tribute to the widely known encoding systems, from cults to road signs, I’ve desaturated the chromatic spectrum and replaced colours with abbreviations. The rainbow, a unique natural phenomenon and a powerful cultural symbol was encoded in blank, quilted surfaces. The wrong side, coloured in the iridescent gradient, in a way, blesses the wearers, charging them with life-asserting energy and suggesting an introspection as a navigator to fulfilment – our portable home.
Another metaphor behind the rainbow statement derives from my objection against the society’s dualism versus animals. Consuming them as food somehow coexists with infantile speculations about pets’ afterlife. Where compassion meets sarcasm, button clusters imitate paw prints on a rainbow tapestry.

I discovered Hennadii’s work when he composed a soundtrack for a fashion video directed by Greg Radomsky, featuring Dzhus alongside other Ukrainian brands, and styled by me. We shot the Extinct & Resurgent short film at Kharkiv Natural History Museum just before the war, with retrofuturistic silhouettes haunting the palaeontological pavilion. As the city got heavily attacked, we have released the film as a symbol of our Motherland’s resistance and vital power. I was impressed with how deeply the music resonated with the anxious, post-apocalyptic mood of the imagery and had since been longing to collaborate with Hennadii again. Until a chance happened to entrust the sound design for the Anticon utopia to him. Not only can I not get enough of the track itself, but also I appreciate the way it interacts with the verses I read from the models’ faces and bodies during the performance.

Being a nonbinary person myself, I’m often frustrated with the social stigmas and discouraged over the absurd pressure any atypical entity is forced to withstand. In solidarity and synthesis with every unique kind of personality, Dzhus glorifies a reunion with our true self and flirts with the gender stereotypes. I fetishise the lingerie leitmotif and corpcore while I point to the fluidity of roles via transformer clothing.