Pamela Hakala’s graduate collection is a landscape, a scenery, a setting of the mind. It’s a magnifying glass raised against the subconscious. Towards the draining of a leech. Crawling and flickering, a red serviette turning itself over, grasping, shielding, comforting, wrapping the cutlery. It’s an X-ray image. Black and white. It’s polished, raw and absurd. The elegance of surrealism. It’s heavy. It’s fulfilling. It’s a shared soul of a girl and a wooden horse strolling in the past.

– The process has been a therapeutic act for me as I, the flesh, inspired by the surrealist tradition, raised the magnifying glass and traced a part of my subconsciousness through drawing, photography and automatic writing, Hakala explains.

And that part now exists and breathes as a collection of five looks. It is a study of constructing a garment with understructure. Corsets, tulle, and boning anchor the collection in the context of formal dressing and fashion history, but it still twists itself to the storyline and etiquette of its own.

– I see the collection as a play with characters and dialogue that hasn’t been written down. The clothes are not costumes but projections. There is no message in this collection. The dialogue happens between the garments themselves and the body wearing them. It doesn’t want to say anything aloud. It’s silent.