In late 2023, Bora Aksu embarked on a creative pilgrimage to Eva Hesse’s birthplace in Hamburg. The designer had become fascinated by portraits of the artist in her New York studio—draped in dust sheets and lying supine beneath her own tendrilous creations—during the height of her productivity in the 1960s. He recalls standing outside her childhood home and the “eerie” feeling that soon took hold. “I started emailing and calling up local galleries like a madman,” he said in a preview ahead of his fall/winter 2024 show. “I needed to see Hesse’s work in person.” When Aksu tracked down a painting—some six hours away at the Wiesbaden Museum near Frankfurt—he wept. It was an act of kismet that he was then invited into the gallery’s basement, where Hesse’s most precious sculptures are stored.
The collection, shown this afternoon in a light-dappled exhibition space in the Hellenic Centre in Marylebone, was a show-and-tell of everything Aksu discovered down there. Mohair lace dresses had been constructed with a mille-feuille of iridescent underskirts to evoke Hesse’s experiments in latex, while blouson-sleeve minidresses and jackets called to mind the painterly shirts she would sculpt in. Knitted cardigans had been figured in the skeletal trees that line her childhood street, and a series of dolly bird jackets and flower-power frocks drew on the general upswing of the 1960s. Some of the models wore lace headscarves—an explicit reference to Hesse’s signature hairstyle—and just about everything was cut from ivories and taupes and butterscotch creams, to highlight the intricate lines of Aksu’s tailoring.
If the designer cast Hesse as this season’s protagonist—much like the outsider artist Henry Darger and Canadian watercolorist Marcel Dzama of his previous collections—she would later take on the role of spirit guide when his mother tragically passed away mid-collection. Hesse was just two years old when she emigrated to the United States, and her work took a dramatic turn towards the poetic when she returned to Germany in 1965 to face the familial wounds the Holocaust had left behind. “She taught me to create art from pain,” Aksu said. “And beauty from trauma.” You could have forgiven the designer for taking a season to regroup, even if his admiral determination proved a balm. He later confirmed that his next collection would be themed around his mother’s life—but so was this one: a spirit-raising homage to the woman who first inspired him to pick up a needle and thread.
