Paju Hyvärinen

The frame of Paju Hyvärinen’s BA thesis collection’s background research is Luis Buñuel’s film Belle de Jour (1967), in which the protagonist, Séverine, lives a seemingly normal life with her husband while secretly working in a brothel during the daytime. The theme of a double life provides a starting point for examining the boundaries between visibility and concealment through clothing. On the one hand, Paju wanted to make the double life visible in a very literal way, so they created garments that can literally be divided into two parts using hook fastening. A significant part of her working methods is a collection of vintage garments, sourced from thrift store free sections, which plays a central role in shaping the collection’s silhouettes, formal language, and colour palette. Her design practice focuses on the body and presence in different garments: how clothing shapes movement, how posture and gesture affect presence, and how garments can function as a form of masking or hiding something. “I explore how clothing changes a person’s presence and how one can hide within the garment, even when there’s almost nothing on.” An important part of Paju’s work is doing all the finishing by hand; creating the finished garment is part of their starting point, not just a working method, as it defines the essence of the piece. The shoes in the collection have been made entirely by hand, using traditional techniques from start to finish. The shoe-making process gave Paju’s work a second layer, allowing the designer to consider the models’ posture and profile. “I want to bring out different characters through my clothes, affecting the mood with small changes. I enjoy seeing the entire atmosphere change when I alter the heel height or place an apple in the model’s hand.”