Elektra
Sadotti

As the daughter of two artists, Elektra Sadotti began her graduate collection intending to expose the ‘radical disjuncture’ within the art world she was born into. Practicing in the vein of Institutional Critique, Sadotti, 23, wishes to present the often ignored notion of artists as brands and the idiosyncrasies relating to artistic discourse. Sadotti reasoned that her collection, if created based solely on works found within prominent art literature, would have intrinsic ‘value’ due to its provenance, regardless of its construction or its maker.

Randomly selected pages of four books provided visual instruction for the aesthetic of the garments. One look is taken from Breakfast at Sotheby’s: An A-Z of the Art World by Phillip Hook and references Henriëtte Ronner-Knip’s Romanticist paintings of cats and Damien Hirst’s Medicine Cabinets. A pair of baggy jeans features decapitated stuffed kittens playing with enlarged balls of wool, whilst a shelf protrudes from the chest of a Hirst-inspired vest. ‘My Institutional collection morphs into an anti-collection,’ says Sadotti.

She previously interned for EFTYCHIA ahead of their AW20 collection, before moving to Paris and working for the show handbags team at Louis Vuitton. If the womenswear graduate had been expecting answers from her collection, she now knows there are no easy ones: ‘As Andrea Fraser says, ‘there is no outside of the institution’.’ 

Sienna Mayers, BA Fashion Journalism
@siennamayers