Photos: Courtesy of Di Petsa
Even before the inception of her fashion label, Dimitra Petsa, the creative mind behind Di Petsa, knew she wanted to marry what she calls “the unsanitized female experience” with her love for performance art. It wasn’t long after the line’s 2018 debut before Petsa’s designs were an all-over hit commodity, not to be missed on the red carpet, in music videos, and fittingly, in celebrity maternity shoots (for seasons now, the designer has featured pregnant models on the runway and in lookbooks). The latter is a manifestation of what lies at the core of it all for Petsa — exploring and celebrating the female form.
Womanhood and the female body have long been at the center of Petsa’s ethos, dating back to the designer’s time studying at Central Saint Martins. “My master’s thesis was all about women and bodily fluids, and how the way we perceive our bodily fluids is very telling of how we perceive our relationship to water at large, and how the female experience is [actually very] sanitized,” Petsa tells Beyond The Pines. These musings would become the origins of the designer’s claims to fame – the “Wetlook dress.” “If you cry in public, you have to hide it. If you sweat in public, you have to hide it. If you breastfeed in public, you have to hide it. I was really interested in that tension of how the female experience is so defined by bodily fluids and, yet, it is something that’s so constricted.”
The emblematic body-conscious garment invites women to “be a part of the performance” in celebrating “wetness,” a sentiment Petsa feels her clients resonate with, even if not wholly understand, though she’s expanded on the concept in her poetry book, titled “Wetness.”
Petsa’s time spent absorbing her grandmother’s dressmaking skills (she ran a tailoring school when Petsa was a child) bonafide the Athen-native’s rhetoric beyond the measuring tape. Rather than playing with dolls, a young Petsa spent time instead with fabric scraps and working alongside her grandmother, a practice that equipped her with an early first-hand experience in working with private clients. “It wasn’t just that a woman comes, and you make [her] a beautiful dress,” Petsa says. “That person is almost like your confidant, your friend. And at the same time, it’s [a] very intimate [experience], because you talk about someone’s body and are very [physically] close to them.”
In retrospect, Petsa says her grandmother’s clients highlighted the necessity for pattern-making from scratch as a means to designing for all body types. It’s an invaluable resource the designer says didn’t shape up to the teachings at Central Saint Martins, nor the too-small arbitrary sizes of premade patterns. What felt like a “natural” business pedagogy for the young brand was, to the designer’s disbelief, enough for a high ranking on Vogue Business’s size inclusivity report. “Why in the world am I number three [on the list]?” she says. “And why isn’t it one of the big brands?”
“I think many designers are taught to have this singular archetype of the woman, and you’re ready for a collection,” Petsa went on. “The base design is always the same … I design almost all of my pieces so that they have this leeway — if you gain a bit of weight or lose a bit of weight, they will still fit.”
Enter Di Petsa’s muses, aptly named “Venuses,” draped most often in anything from corset-like breastfeeding bras, showcased with one side dipping lower to expose a breast, to vagina-pocketed jeans. Inspired partly by the ‘Madonna-whore complex’ (the Sigmund Freud-coined explanation behind some individual’s inabilities to become sexually aroused by a partner they respect and are committed to), Petsa’s newest collection, titled “The Body As Prayer” and slated for Fall 2024 balances both extreme and intentional cutouts with a crowning “Mother Wetlook,” and the Virgin Mary-adjacent maternity mesh dress, famously worn by a pregnant Gigi Hadid.
Di Petsa isn’t, however, a one-trick pony. Its world continues to evolve each season, offering, beyond an immaculately done slinky gown, delicate floor-length trenches, leather trousers, and sleek turtlenecks, to name a few. The designer expects the Wetlook dress to remain a part of the brand, but ultimately feels there’s more to explore. “We are a more multidisciplinary brand,” Petsa says. Take for example, the bridal designs the brand shows alongside its ready-to-wear. “Actually, my first dress ever sold was bridal. So, for me, bridalwear [was a part of the brand] from the very beginning.” For the curious, the designer also confirms there’s more of it to come. “Bridal and maternity wear are a big part of my business, for sure,” she says. “It’s so interesting to talk with brides who say, ‘I want the wet-look. I want to be naked, but my mother-in-law will kill herself.”
With her second poetry book currently in the works, it’s hard not to declare Petsa can seem to do it all. If present momentum is any indicator, the designer’s brand seems to have a long life of evolving through art ahead, coaxing, with each design, a generation of women out of hiding.
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