When Cretan princess Ariadne hatched a plan to kill the labyrinth-dwelling Minotaur with her lover Theseus, she bestowed him with a ball of thread, so he could lead himself from the maze after completing the murderous deed. This got Athens-based Dimitra Petsa—whose Greek mythology-exploring collections draw on Persephone’s transformation into the queen of the underworld and the homecoming of Odysseus—to thinking about the symbol of the horned Minotaur, half-human, half-bull, as a reflection of the shadow and light that exist within women. If our body is a complex labyrinth, then for Petsa, the thread that will lead us through darkness for spring 2025 is female self-pleasure. “It’s a concept that has always been viewed as very low-brow, but people don’t give value to the divine power that it has,” she said.
Frustrated by the polarizing Madonna-whore complex bestowed on women, or the medicalized and sexualized binaries they are restricted by, Petsa has used her catwalk to give center stage to societally hidden pregnant bodies since she launched her brand in 2019, using her signature wet-look illusion dresses to emphasize bulging bumps. For spring she doubled down on taboos associated with the female body: a skintight mini-dress featured a lactating nipple print; skimpy red-tinged bikini bottoms evoked the stains of menstruation blood; draped mesh trousers in dégradé blues and turquoises appeared as if drenched in bodily fluid; “masturbation denim,” included low-rise jeans with a distressed triangular pocket at the crotch. “They’re designed to look like they’ve been really rubbed,” Petsa said with a smile.
The self-pleasure theme of the collection took shape out of the disintegration of Petsa’s long-term relationship. “I was living in turbulence, and the only lifeboat was my vagina,” the designer said, discussing the role her own body took as an anchor. As a result of the break-up, she reconnected with her male friends, considering how menswear rarely explores “the divinity of clothing” and the potency it can impress onto the body. Spring saw a solid expansion into daring menswear: body-sculpting pleated shirting and wet-look tracksuits; crotch-emphasizing “hard-on” denim, plus a metal codpiece and talismanic nipple jewels, which a handcraft-obsessed Petsa made herself.
With a degree in performance art, Petsa often incorporates herself into her body-diverse theatrical shows, through live music or a poetry recital. For spring she instead played a theatrical voice of god (correction: goddess!), pre-recording an invocation to self-pleasure that boomed across the catwalk. Models gestured with blood-stained fingers and rouged mouths, mimicked Minotaur horns with their hands, and walked with sand-stained hair and tan line-stained bodies as if straight from a sordid romp on the beach. As a final choreographed tableau, a topless male model wrapped the other inclusive bodies on the catwalk with a blood red ball of yarn, each navigating their own internal labyrinth, where masturbation is not maligned, but mythologized.
