Dimitra Petsa

A lot of things, to be honest. I'm really in an era where I'm trying to enjoy myself. I love reading, and I also love writing. I'm writing my next poetry book right now, so I think there's a real sense of pleasure in writing for me, because it's very, also, confronting. With visual language like fashion and art, you can hide behind the allegory of image and aesthetics, whereas with writing, it’s more revealing in a way. I do find some pleasure in pushing myself and challenging my own boundaries of shame. Even in our shows, the fact that I perform with the models is, in a way, this kind of test of my shame and my vulnerability.

For sure, one of the things that has been very big for me was all about bodily fluids; crying in public, and stuff like that. I was really able to let go, and I'm still in the process of letting go of shame. Especially as a femme person; it's something so deeply ingrained in us. The way that we are very sanitised and put into boxes in society. It's like a constant unlearning that you need to do - that being emotional doesn't mean that you're not strong, or when you're overcome with emotions, that doesn't make you any less of a leader, or any less of a strong person. And you kind of need to honour that, and sometimes to honour that means I'm going to show people my vulnerability.

I think that through the ritual of dressing, you can let go of a lot of that. When you start to realise that being a woman is such a performative thing in itself, and just existing as any person is such a, like it's theatre, you know. When you choose the role that you want through dressing, that can be super empowering, and it can put you in touch with your true self very much. When I design, a lot of women tell me that they feel sexual or sensual, but they don't feel this classic male gaze sexuality from it, because it's very much me, and how I view my own body, and how I view this. I think it's really important to wear things that have this history and can empower you, you know?
I think for a really long time, sexy clothes have not been considered so avant-garde. The avant-garde fashion is more masculine-inspired, more covered. So it's kind of like equating sex and sensuality with something less than, and more covered with something that's more highbrow. It's really interesting to delve into these things and say, no, for me, these things actually can go together. You can be very sensual and really celebrate your nakedness. There's a lot of wisdom in sensuality and being able to be in touch with that part of yourself.

Even if you go to more, say, religious depictions of bodies and such, we were born naked and, being naked is our natural state. I think that clothing should decorate our nakedness rather than hide it. How do you decorate your nakedness? You can be fully clothed and have this essence of this is my nakedness celebrated, but I think it should never be hidden in shame, which is kind of this balance.

Having the opportunity to be part of nature in any way. Hiking or swimming or doing full moon rituals or anything like that. I do have a very big affinity with water and the sea. I love swimming in the full moon at night. In Greece, sometimes I go to the beach with bioluminescent plankton. So you swim, and with every stroke you see this bioluminescent sparkle.
You realise why people of the past felt the need for religion and for something to explain this monumental beauty that nature has. Sometimes I look at some bush or a flower, or some weird trees, and I'm like how is this made and real and this divine geometry of things? I think there's just so much beauty and mystery around us that is very inspiring.

Growing up in Greece, unfortunately, this is a society that's a little bit more closed off, and there are a lot of traditional views of how women are expected or socially allowed to perceive pleasure. I saw the place of women and women's sensuality is very hidden and kind of hushed down. Moving to London was very much a more freeing experience for me. No one gives a fuck. The way that people can avoid staring at someone, it's an art form. Have you ever been on the tube and someone’s doing something weird in the middle of the carriage, but everyone is perfectly not looking at them? It's really interesting. Because in Greece, everybody would be, you know.
I started exploring this and thinking about my own and my friends’ experiences, and who decides what are the narratives around our bodies. We used to do a lot of full moon rituals online that were all about re-narrating our bodies because so many parts of women’s bodies are very defined by patriarchy. For example, the vagina is either medicalised or sexualised. It's either the vagina or the pussy. There is nothing in between. And there's no other narrative that we have decided for ourselves. Maybe my vagina is something mythological that to me reflects safety. It's interesting how we name our body parts and what they mean to us. And how much, again, shame we have surrounding our bodies. Like, if you breastfeed in public, you have to hide it. 

I don't know why, but all my work has always been very much about intimacy. Greece is a place where you can’t be so freely sexual, but at the same time, there is a sense of people looking at you. This smaller community has a tension of intimacy. Whereas in London, you are more free to be yourself. But sometimes there is a lack of intimacy. Coming to London, it was this back and-forth within me of loving being able to express myself more here. But I am craving that more, like, intimacy with strangers. Intimacy with strangers is one of the purest forms of intimacy because, in a way, it's very unconditional, right? It happens a lot that I will go out and complete strangers will just start telling me their deepest secrets. It's not so much that people have secrets. I think it's more that people don't have someone who wants to listen to their secrets or, like, who's ready, you know?

And it's so interesting, this interchange of energies. The theme of intimacy, especially now I'm more into the theme of love, has really deepened because I recently broke up with my partner of eight years. It's very interesting how intimacy is exchanged in relationships and how people view it. It's so intricate in a way. And actually, also very beautiful because you can have a very deep connection with a stranger at the pub, you know. And you can also have a very deep connection with someone that you've been with for eight years. I think all of us humans just crave connection. And, with me when I do my shows, I really connect with my models and with the whole team. I think it's always a sense of camaraderie and friendship.

You know what? It really comes from you, like, from me, I think. For example, our models say that backstage we have the most calm, loving, and supportive backstage because for me who you work with is so important. To me, it's more important than portfolios. The personality is equally important as the level of their work. It's really important that everybody feels supported and that we're all there for a common goal. Also, at the same time, I am a person that I do get emotionally attached to people. We have some models that literally walk every single show I have ever done. I love developing relationships and seeing someone grow season by season. Object Blue, the DJ that you're talking about, like, she's so amazing. I have seen her with her partner, Natalia, they grow together. I mean, I'm thinking, wow, like, I love what they have. So, I thought it was very fitting for this show because that show, AW24, was all about love. And so, I felt like it was a good anathema, or like an omen to put this energy into the show.

Yeah, that's how I am. And that's how I want to work with other people. I think, naturally, you can attract the same energy, I feel. I'm a big believer in that.

I love talking. I can really get lost in someone. I'm just really interested in people. I think I always have been to the point where we could talk for three hours about you, and I'm just completely like, how do you feel about this? And what do you like about that? You know, I love connecting like this, but also I love dancing. I love dancing with my friends and being able to express a more, almost primal self through dancing. And also, I love dressing up with my friends. It's almost as much fun or more fun than actually going out.

Right now, I'm really into hiking. So, hiking. We also have the Greek Easter coming up. There is this ritual that they do here, which is called an Easter wreath. Basically, you get flowers, herbs, and things you find as you hike in the mountains. Then you make a flower circle, and then you hang it on your door. I'm really excited to do that with my friends, actually.

And, to be honest, that's true for me. Because with owning a brand, you increasingly do a lot less and less handiwork because now I have to focus more on running the business and like meetings and emails and going to factories and all that. So sometimes I'm just like, okay, I know that I can get someone else to do this dress or something, but I just want to sit and do it all by myself. Yeah. I feel like I need it.

And you know what else is really good? Being bored. I think that people love to be bored.

I did like an essay on this when I was in PDP. I read somewhere that there was a study that showed that people who are more bored, and who allow themselves to do more boring activities are better at empathy. You sit there and think about what someone has done, what you would have done, different scenarios. You have more emotional processes.

To be honest, I daydream a lot about my collections. Like a lot, a lot, a lot. I can't stop thinking about it. I'm thinking I want to do this campaign, I want to do this dress. And sometimes what happens with me is that I feel like I have so many ideas that I get a bit overwhelmed and I don't know when to do what or, I'm like, okay, Dimitra, you need to focus on three ideas for this collection. You can't do all 20.

I haven't been diagnosed with that, but I definitely have learned through again, building the brand, to be more organised and to be like, okay, as much as it hurts, I have to put this idea on the back burner and focus on these three ideas.

Oh, definitely. What I really believe about tradition is that it's a living thing. Once you start to simply replicate it, then it becomes a historical artifact rather than like this living language. I think traditional craftsmanship, and especially women's traditional craftsmanship and embroideries, I think it's a language. It's something that's living in a way. So, you know, through my work I keep this sense of storytelling and signifying and having different symbols and stuff like that. That's how I'm even still now implementing that into my work.
I don't know if you saw in our last collection, we had this metal embossed corset which is very much inspired by embroidery symbols, but it was like my symbols that I reinterpreted to tell a different story about female divinity. It was really important for me that this is made by hand and not by a machine. So these are all hand-carved by me, actually. So that was one of the things that I was like, I have to do this myself. The beautiful thing about women doing something with their hands is talking through this visual language, that's something that I want to keep alive.

To be honest, that's something that I would like to do more, like this community sense of embroidery. But in a way, we have this in the atelier. When we all make the white looks together and the things for a new collection, we're all like telling stories and connecting. I think fashion is very deeply healing and an emotional place, especially for women, historically as well.

Listen, I was rebellious in the way that I would sneak out to go to clubs. I would say that I'm at sleepovers, but I was at the club, high heels, smoking. But actually, I was a very calm teenager in other ways. I liked being alone and drawing and reading my books. I read “Little Women” 10 times. That's a real number by the way, like 10. I think I was very in my own world.

I was in the PDP when I discovered Ana Mendieta. I guess I was 19, 20, something like that. So like nine years ago. I had such a gut reaction to her work and this connection with nature. But at the same time, it was very, almost, like punk. Within eco-feminism, there are a lot of waves, there's the initial idea of women and flowers, and then there are other ideas that women don't have to be beautiful flowers. I think for me to equate our body with the earth is something that I resonate with deeply.

I think she's also a very deeply unashamed woman. I think the things she did were very, very interesting, and especially for the time she was doing them, she just didn't care.

So this is actually changing and mutating the more shows that I do and the more seasons. I am very autobiographical in my work and every season you can sort of see what is happening in my life. You can see that a lot through the makeup and the creative direction that we go through. For example, SS24, was when I had just gone through a breakup. I was really thinking about this idea of how you can become oneself with someone and then you are called to become your own self again. I was researching the goddess of love and fertility, Venus, and what it represents in ancient Greek rituals surrounding this. I had all these women that were embracing their sensuality and their idea of self. It was all about divine beauty but at the same time, through makeup, we had their eyes be red and looked like they were crying. I had a lot of these little things. It's kind of like an Easter egg hunt. There's a lot more than meets the eye every time in the collections. And in the latest collection that I just did, AW24, we had these like bloody fingers.

Yes and this represented masturbating on your period.

So it's about accepting this darker sensuality. I always add details like that. For example, there was the dress that I did for AW24 that was inspired by a dress that I wore one night when I kind of fell in love with someone. The thing with these personal references is you don't immediately know what they are unless you know me and I literally told you what it is. I think you always get this energy of intimacy, of sharing secrets, of sharing something personal. Every time the collections are influenced by what I'm researching, what I'm reading. I was reading a lot about the Madonna-Whore complex for AW24, you know divine sexuality, women, and religion in general, so yeah. I'm just reading a lot, to be honest.

(Laughs) Yeah, that would be fun.

I'm very in touch with my inner child. I would say that's why we have a lot of references to pregnancy in my work because it's about being pregnant with your own self, guarding your inner child. All of this is very important to me. So I do think it's important. What I'm trying to do now more and more is to allow myself more time to just experiment, and allow myself more time to play. Every season I'm starting to feel like there's this expected thing for me but I want to challenge what that is. Not doing things that are unexpected just for the sake of it being unexpected because I don't care about that, but just for me to feel like I am creatively pushing myself. I always want to learn new things.

I think it's also about expectations that people have of you and that you have to perform in a way. There are people who might read my books or my poetry or my dissertation or something like that, and they're like “Oh you're a very educated person, you have read a lot but you're so nice and funny” and all this. Being able to have fun and be in touch with your inner child shouldn't be an indicator of intelligence or lack thereof. It's really interesting how we put things into boxes, and sometimes you feel called to perform something that is not authentic. I think people expect me because I'm a businesswoman, to be doing this whole thing to be more of a bitch, you know? To be more severe, and serious, and unfeeling. I am not that person. I have a very strong sense of boundaries, but at the same time, I like to laugh. I'm really friendly with everyone. 

Yeah, you can lead with real connections with people. We're doing really well with business and I think we're doing it because we're authentically building relationships.

To be honest, I've always been very intuitive and sensitive. I've always been very interested in things you can't touch but that you can feel. I've always been very inspired by magical realism in literature. This is all about a heightened sense of reality, which I feel like I experience quite a lot. I will see a woman sitting on the tube and the strap of her dress falls down, and I just feel so enamoured and inspired. In these little beautiful moments, I feel that life is poetry. I've always felt like that but it manifests into different things. I do full moon rituals, I do movement things. I love dancing. Dancing for me is a big release.

Gratitude is an amazing thing. I don't do it as much as I ought to, but I think it would be beneficial if I did it even more. For a long time I had a gratitude journal, so every night I would write what I'm grateful for that day. I am a very ambitious person and I always want to do more, bigger, better, more refined. I put a lot of pressure on myself so sometimes I just try to say that yes, I want all these things, but I'm also really grateful for what I already have, and that I am grateful that these things are happening anyway, because if I have this intention of them happening, they are in the process of happening.

Yes, of course. I love doing it through clothes. All the stones that I put into our dresses and our clothes all have a manifestation meaning behind them. They're almost like spells. For example, the wetlook pink Venus dress, has pink quartz, clear quartz, gold hand-carved jewellery, and seashells that kind of evoke Venus and love. It’s a self-love dress. I did another dress that's with lapis lazuli, smoky quartz, clear quartz, and silver for moon creativity and sensuality. I put a lot of intention behind clothes.

I do. You know, for the last red carpet I did for the British Fashion Awards I wore this blue dress. I wanted to do something that would give me a sense of moon confidence, so I used silver lapis lazuli and deep blue stones, and I just felt the side of myself that was very calm. 

I have always loved rocks in general. When I was young, I used to collect beautiful pebbles from the beach. Actually, for one of the collections, I got the colour scheme from different pebbles that I had collected. So I do stuff like that. But I have to say during Covid is when I got really into crystals. And I think a lot of people did at the same time, people had a lot more time to be more esoteric in general. But yeah, I started reading about it and the connection of crystals to ancient Greek religion as well, so there's this kind of story and history within my culture.

And we all come from energy. It's how you connect to it, to be honest. Anything has energy. Even this cardigan I’m wearing now. It's more about how you connect to it. You might get a big amethyst and not feel so much. And then you get a little one, but you feel a connection to that particular one.

I love writing poetry. I love writing. Right now I'm writing my next book and I just feel through writing it - I don't know, like I feel like I'm tapping into a lot of my memories and experiences that maybe on some level I haven't even processed as much. But then when you process it creatively, you understand yourself. Human nature is so complex, you have to see how you fit into all of that. Writing is the answer.

Anything creative is a spiritual practice. It's creation, and creation is a sexual energy also. You potentially create through sex, not all sex, but you can create life, human life. It's really interesting how we connect with creativity in general. Just imagine this process of having something thought of in the immaterial world and then making it material. I think there's some sort of spiritual energy in that.

It's very human in a way, right?

Actually, I want to prepare to do them in a physical setting in London. I want to explore what is fashion. You know, fashion is the clothes that I make for you to wear, but fashion is your body. So I feel like through the full moon workshops, we're dressing your bodies with ideas and re-narrating your body. It's kind of like going back one step before you put on clothes. Like how do you connect to your kind of naked body, your inner world? That's really interesting to me. But yeah, it's just a lot of logistics and like getting a space. But I would love to do it.
I think I would first do it with a smaller group of people and then see how it can evolve. When we were doing the online workshops, you had to apply to be part of it. We wanted to create this sense of community where everybody's supported. I think there's just something special about people coming together with a common goal too. Even if that is just exploring and connecting to the earth, connecting to the moon, to each other.

Yeah, yeah. I'll invite you.

To be honest, there were so many people crying. Many times, like there was a lot of release, letting go. I think giving people agency and a sense of strength through their creativity is really important. So I gave them poetry prompts, I would ask stuff like “What does the fruit of your transformation taste like?” Stuff like that is something to put you into this trance of creativity and exploring yourself. Showing you that you can be creative and you can be a poet and all this.
Because I am a very intuitive person, I connect a lot with people. So after the Full Moon workshops, many times I had to do self-care for myself. But it's just so beautiful because we're all there for it. Sometimes after the workshops, I would feel healed myself, you know. It's so beautiful meeting all these different people, and having something in common. I think it’s all very beautiful.

For sure, for sure. It's about embodiment, I think. Because in the city that we're in now [London], it's very much like, it's all in our head if you think about it. I was watching this lecture, and he was saying how in our education system, it’s progressively more and more about what’s in our head. And our body is just something to carry our head around. We don't have physical knowledge or body knowledge. So like, where is the gut knowledge, the other brain that's in our stomach, you know?

It's a journey back. I think our bodies are like our Ithaca, you know. Do you know this poem?

I'll send it to you. Basically, in Odyssey, he wanted to go back to Ithaca. So Ithaca is like the idea of homecoming in Greek literature. The idea that we're constantly trying to go back to something that we may or may not eventually find. But it's the journey that matters, not the destination.

Yes. I haven't done it yet, but I really want to start doing shower rituals.

It's a water manifestation ritual. When you're in the shower, you set up your space with crystals or with whatever you want, affirmations, and stuff like that. Then you shower and let the water wash over you. And you're thinking about letting go of the old self, new things that you want in your life, and kind of cleansing yourself of winter and going into the spring awakenings.

No.

All right. My rose is that right now I'm in Greece. I'm really grateful to be here, to be with my family, for the weather.
My thorn is getting ready for production. It's always the same thing. Like we have to go straight into production and designing the new collection at the same time. And you know, all these things. That's my thorn, like every season.
And then my bud is that we're working on my first resort collection. So it's going to come out soon. And it's kind of like this bridal resort thing. I'm really excited. 

So it's very much about nymphs and the fluidity of the body. Also, we’re going to have menswear for the first time. So I'm really excited about this.

(Laughs)

You know what I imagine? I imagine glasses of wine or water that they play with the fingers. That's what I imagine.

You know, blue really makes me feel at home. Kind of, like centred.

Not to sound very narcissistic, but I think I would be sunset. Because I think it's kind of like this in between night and day. In between the beautiful optimism of seeing all these like beautiful colours, and the sadness and mystery of the night. I think that's how I am because I think I'm a very sunny person. But at the same time, I have a lot of deep emotions.

It has to be of my brand. I think, what I have built.