HOLY MILK: DI PETSA
Love, sexuality and womanhood – Dimitra Petsa on the sacredness of the everyday.
Backstage at DI PETSA, everything felt slightly otherworldly and dreamlike. The muses floated between mirrors and HMU stations draped in translucent lace, and hand painted limbs, while a nurturing energy held steady amongst the chaos of pre-show preparations.
It was an appropriate atmosphere for HOLY MILK, Dimitra Petsa’s SS27 collection, which explores motherhood, transformation and the sacredness of the everyday.
When asked what are three things holy to her, PETSA replied in her calming confident tone; “I think it's love. I think it's sexuality. And I think it's womanhood.”
The three ideals feel inseparable within her world. Sensuality becomes ritual and the body and self is to be worshipped and approached with curiosity.
“I think there is God and the Divine in everything,” she says. “Especially as women we have so many special moments in the everyday that we're not really talking about. Even breastfeeding, that's divine… There's so much that we just say is everyday, but it's not.”
HOLY MILK turns these everyday experiences into divine phenomena. Translucent fabrics, wet-look dresses, Minoan references and sculptural jewellery move around the body like relics. The sea — a recurring presence in Petsa's work – appears again as a place of transformation and return.
The collection carries that sense of inheritance: between mothers and daughters, between generations, and between the person we are and the person we are becoming.
Petsa speaks about believing in energies and serendipity — “things that fall into place when you are opening yourself to them.” Her garments seem to occupy that same space, giving physical form to something otherwise intangible – the mysteries of womanhood, spirituality and the divine.
The show culminates in a surreal final image, with pregnant singer Leigh-Anne Pinnock closing the runway in white and releasing milk across the catwalk. It is theatrical, strange and completely at home within Petsa's universe.
So what makes something DI PETSA?
“I think I do it, it comes from my heart” she says. “It’s about the sea and about the community of women.”
HOLY MILK asks us to look again at what can be mistaken as ordinary – the body, motherhood, desire, becoming – and wonder whether we have been overlooking the sacred hiding in plain sight.
See more from DI PETSA here
Words and photos by Simone Taylor
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