Michaela Stark : Intimate, Sensual, Grotesque

 

Michaela Stark,  the 27-year-old Brisbane-born, London-based artist and designer has captivated international media with her innovative take on lingerie, which she handcrafts and sells to private clients. Using hand-dyed silk taffeta, silk organza, silk chiffon and invisible tulle, Stark offers delicate brassieres with peekaboo panels, pearl-encrusted thongs, body-sculpting corsets, and panties and bloomers trimmed with distressed cotton muslin or reams of silk ribbon.
 
But it’s the way Stark presents her work — mostly on herself — that has the knickers of the social media censors in a knot. Through self-portraits and collaborations with established photographers, Stark deploys extreme styling and body-morphing techniques to create mesmerising abstract human sculptures that, in her words, explore the issues of body dysmorphia, beauty standards, sexuality and fetish. Breasts, hips and stomach bulge out of peepholes and corsetry. Arms, legs and midriffs are tightly trussed up with nylon fishing line, evocative of a human roast.
 
 “Does it hurt?” is one of the most common questions Stark receives from her Instagram fans, who now number more than 100,000. “It doesn’t hurt — that often,” comes the answer down the line from London in late November, as she is prepping for her international exhibition debut, Stark Naked. It’s a series of images taken by Norwegian photographer Sølve Sundsbø, on show at Dover Street Market’s 3537 cultural and creative centre in Paris.
 
Stark and Sundsbø also collaborated in September in what Stark has described as her most extreme body-morphing work to date. “I kind of have a bit of a fetish for the pain, I think sometimes,” she says, adding that she felt like she was about to “throw up or pass out” at one point during the most recent shoot, with her sister on hand with water and a fan.
 
“Now that I’m in it, I want to push my body further and see how far I can go because I also love creating the imagery,” she adds. “I don’t want to Photoshop [the images]; I want it to be how it is, and I want to pull it to extremes, and so I am going tighter and tighter every time. Sometimes I get caught up in the art of it all.”
 
The art world may be loving it, but the social media gatekeepers are not. Citing violations of community standards, Instagram has repeatedly removed Stark’s posts and made threats to take down the account entirely, prompting Stark to launch a precautionary backup account.
 
Even Google issues an “explicit content” prompt in some search results. “I’ve had photos taken down that had nothing showing,” says Stark. “And I have friends on the [Instagram] moderators [team] who say sometimes it doesn’t even matter if nothing is showing: if they deem it as sexual, they deem it as sexual, and that’s it.
 
They’ll still take the image down, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It is so scary because I’ve found myself in a group in London of artists who do create provocative work, so all of us are constantly having our careers and livelihoods threatened by Instagram.”
 
 
Stark’s art is essentially a defiant middle finger to the fashion world, from which she says she felt excluded while growing up in Brisbane. At the time, she explains, she wore a 32/34FF bra size and felt “uncomfortable all the time” because she was bigger than her friends and struggled to find clothes and lingerie that fit properly.

 
After completing a bachelor of design (fashion) at the Queensland University of Technology — during which she spent a year on exchange with the Politecnico di Milano, a university in Milan that specialises in engineering, architecture and design — one of Stark’s teachers hooked her up with a three-month internship at the Paris showroom of veteran fashion agent Florence Deschamps. “It was my first ever taste of European fashion and how the fashion industry ran in Paris and in Europe,” she says. “I was sneaking into the Vivienne Westwood afterparty and just doing all these different things, and it was like, Oh my god! I was just so excited the whole time.”
 
When she came back to Brisbane, she was determined to save enough money to return to Europe as quickly as possible, so she worked two jobs while simultaneously completing her honours certificate. Her graduate collection, titled Fashion as Grotesque Spectacle, featured lingerie alongside ruched and quilted ready-to-wear pieces in flesh-coloured satin, with names such as the Saggy Skin dress and the Fatroll Jumpsuit.
 
In 2017, within a week of arriving in London, Stark landed an internship with the young multidisciplinary artist Claire Barrow. For the next six months, she moved between the studios of several emerging London fashion talents, including Ashley Williams. And then Queen Bey came calling.
 
Through a friend, Stark connected with an associate of Beyoncé’s personal stylist, Zerina Akers, who was looking for a tailor for the singer’s 2018 Apeshit video with Jay-Z. The next thing Stark knew, she was in Beyoncé’s Paris hotel room piecing together garments from the Versace home range to create a robe for the singer to wear on camera. All up, Stark spent about a year working with Beyoncé as a costume designer, personal tailor and assistant to Akers. She toured Europe and Africa, and worked on the 2020 film Black is King.
 
Stark has also worked with Marine Serre, Christian Louboutin and Cartier, all the while working on her own lingerie line behind the scenes. “Basically, I’m born to be in couture,” she says. “I love to just make clothes really, really slowly, do as much handwork on them as possible.”
 
She developed the photographic side of her art separately. It was during a late 2016 road trip along Australia’s east coast with her photographer mate Domino Aurora that Stark started learning the basics of photography and shooting Aurora in clothes from one of her graduate collections.
 
Later in her bedrooms in Paris and London, she started photographing herself in her lingerie pieces and creating content for Instagram. “I was just sewing and sewing and sewing and developing, and that’s when my practice sort of got really strong,” she says. “I’d already had a year, maybe a year and a half, of me playing around with it, and then in 2019, I just sort of went for it and started taking photos of myself, uploading all the time, and that’s when the photography met the body- morphing, and it became this whole package.”
 
Stark’s work has attracted not only a legion of online fans, but also its fair share of negative social media commentary, some of which she has archived on an Instagram Stories highlight. Some have slammed her work as “bondage pornwear” and “disfiguring”, while accusing Stark of self-hatred. Then there’s the old chestnut that is invariably trotted in any discussion about size-inclusive fashion — that it is “normalising obesity”.
 
“I do know that it’s quite extreme. It’s not only an extreme shape to put your body in physically; it’s also a way of seeing your body and exposing yourself in a way that not really anyone has done,” says Stark, of the flak she receives.“But I get messages from other people saying it helped them see their body shape in a different way and see their curves and their fat as something that could be beautiful, which I think is crazy and amazing because it did start as just a project for me, for myself, alone in my bedroom in Paris or my studio in London.

 
“I want [my clients] to feel the same way that I do in my pieces,” she continues, “which is to feel that they love it, that they feel sexy, that they feel amazing and confident. Then at the end of the day, the hate online or the negative comments don’t phase us because we know how great we feel and we know how great we look, and for every bad comment, there are 100 good comments.”
 
Michaela Stark: Couture lingerie designer and body-morphing artist. By  Patty Huntington. Harper’s Bazaar Australia, Jan/Febr, 2022.

In Michaela Stark’s collections, beauty is distorted. Her sculpted lingerie blurs the boundaries of the sensual and the grotesque, creating extreme shapes and eye-watering contortions. Fat bulges, flesh is compressed, and limbs are strung up like joints of meat. On the skin itself, pain can be seen everywhere: through welts, scars, and in purpling, blood-starved complexions. But for the artist and couturier, these images are about much more than provocation. In fact, they are a vivid, mocking exploration of the lengths we go to in the name of conventional beauty norms, and the discomfort – sometimes agony – we endure to make our bodies seem desirable.
 
Australia-born Stark began her career as a seamstress. Despite finding success – and working with Beyoncé repeatedly, on music videos and her Black Is King tour – she began focusing on her own more conceptual lingerie projects in 2018. Using herself as model, Stark would squeeze herself into increasingly constrictive corsetry, creating bulbous, sensuous shapes with her own body. Part performance, part “fashion experiment”, these designs were part of a lifelong fascination with the way we perceive our own bodies.
 

Stark’s latest project, Stark Naked, is a continuation of this work. Currently on show at Dover Street Market’s 3537 in Paris, the exhibition sees the artist collaborate with photographer Sølve Sundsbø for a series of lavish, if unsettling, imagery. “This collection was very much about me creating couture lingerie for different bodies, not just myself,” Stark tells AnOther. Instead, she worked with models Jade ‘O’ Belle and Dodo Potato for six months, creating couture lingerie that was tailored to their curves, and inspired by their personal relationships with their bodies.
 
The resulting pieces – made from invisible tulle, silk chiffon and grosgrain ribbon – are hand-dyed to look like skin, giving an effect of engorged flesh and mysterious bodily growths. “We treated the [fabrics] to look like skin, and then added pleats and embroidery on top to reference the way that the skin wrinkles under the corset, like saggy, wrinkly skin,” Stark explains. The aim, she adds, was to create a veil of uncanny ambiguity. “It’s all very non-descript, so I think I could see something in it but then someone else looks at it and see something different.”

 
For such an intimate project, it was vital to find the right photographer. “I’ve had a hard time working with photographers in the past, because I feel like my work is so much about having control over your body and the image you’re projecting,” Stark says. “That’s why my work is so powerful, I think – because it’s not just putting models in underwear. It’s allowing them to have control over what their body looks like.” After meeting Norwegian photographer Sundsbø on a shoot, the pair instantly connected: Stark felt comfortable being vulnerable around him, and found him to be sensitive, diligent and considerate when it came to her overall vision.
 
Sundsbø is equally positive about his experience with Stark. “Michaela is very focused and knows exactly what she wants to say. That’s very special,” he tells AnOther. “Even in 2021 there are taboos and norms to be questioned and broken. She does that in such a brave, interesting and beautiful way ... What makes her work unique for me is how much she offers of herself in such a fearless way. She makes these ephemeral beautiful pieces of clothing and brings in a hyper-real world of flesh and brutal honesty. Her own flesh and her own truth about her body.”

 
For Stark, these experiments with couture lingerie have helped her rebuild a more loving, accepting relationship with herself. After experiencing body dysmorphia as a teenager, she became obsessive about the flaws of her body. It was only after she decided to embrace them – even boldly accentuate them – for her art, that she began to change her view. “I’ve come to appreciate different parts of my body,” she says, “not just the fat, but the hair, the pimples, the stretch marks, and any sort of imperfection. [My work] has helped me see them in a completely different way: I’ve stopped obsessing over the surface things, and started thinking about my body more deeply, and getting inspired by it more deeply.”
 
Stark Naked is running at DSM’s 3537 in Paris until December 19.
 
Stark Naked: Intimate Images of Michaela Stark’s Sensual, Grotesque Designs. By  Dominique Sisley. Another Magazine, December 13, 2021. 

Few have made a name for sensuous, body-positive lingerie quite like Michaela Stark. With her latest collection — titled Stark Naked and on show at the Dover Street Market-affiliated 3537 Gallery in Paris until 19 December — the couture artist pushes her practice to its furthest point yet, creating pieces that contort the body into shapes so otherworldly that they’re almost unrecognisable. In the Marais space, these chiffon, tulle and organza garments hang like sculptures; their transformative potential demonstrated in a new series of images created in collaboration with photographer Sølve Sundsbø and makeup artist Kevin Cordo. This is also where, on Tuesday night, Michaela staged a performance, taking a pair of scissors to an iconic Jean Paul Gaultier cone corset (with l’enfant terrible’s support, of course!) live on stage, before wearing the reworked piece in her signature body morphing style.

 
Michaela’s work has always been about highlighting perceived imperfections, with the body becoming as much a part of the final look as the lingerie itself. For this exhibition, however, she decided to show the garments separate from their worn context, so as not to distract from the hours’ worth of intricate handcraft invested in each piece. Body positivity remains an important message, but rather than accept the body as it is naturally, this is a collection created with the intention of transforming it beyond familiar perception. It’s an attempt to present human bodies as alien lifeforms, altered and exaggerated to extremity through humble cloth.
 
The exhibition also marks the first time that Michaela has taken her work offline. While she has always struggled against Instagram censorship, the platform has long been the primary way for her to showcase her work. Until now. Indeed, this collection is a testament to Michaela’s versatility as an artist and designer, and her ability to create work that feels as at home in a formal gallery setting as it does on an iPhone screen.
 
How would you introduce your latest collection, Stark Naked?
 
 
 
MS :
It's a collection of couture lingerie that has been designed for specific models — me, Jade 'O' Belle and Dodo Potato. At the start of the year, I completed my Second Skin collection, which was all about me. I wanted to expand that. I started working with Jade 'O' Belle really slowly to develop this couture look on her then the exhibition came and that's when I brought in Dodo. We have been working on the shapes for months, making them so that they morph the body so extremely that you almost can't recognise it anymore. It's been designed to highlight the imperfections of our bodies; the things that we have been previously taught to hide.
 
For this collection, I found a lot of inspiration in the skin and the flesh. I used silk organza, silk chiffon, and tulle that had all been dyed to either match the models' skin or to replicate aging or decaying skin. I've included embroidery that is reminiscent of wrinkles, stretch marks or veins. It's about referencing the body in a nondescript way, and allowing the pieces to stand as artworks on their own. In the images, Kevin Cordo did the body makeup, highlighting the red marks and all the lines that would be left from wearing a corset. That really exaggerated the shape.
 
This exaggeration through makeup gives the images this otherworldly quality. Is that the direction your work is going in?
 
MS :
Yeah. A lot of people put my work into the category of body positivity. It is, for sure, but a lot of the time body positivity is about celebrating the body as it is naturally. My work rarely shows the natural body. It's about accentuating the body into such a deformed shape that it's not natural anymore; it’s quite otherworldly, in fact. I've always loved this idea of fantasy. Fashion is fantasy, couture especially. I would love to create new worlds that you can experience in real life. Step by step, I'm bringing my work into the real world and I think it's going to become more fantastical — it's quite shocking to see the body morphed in real life, as opposed to on Instagram where we are already so used to seeing bodies manipulated with tools like FaceTune.

 
 
Do you have a favourite way of presenting your work?
 
MS :
I'm starting to get really into the idea of performance. I started off by showing my work on Instagram and doing it from the privacy of my bedroom. I didn’t have to actually show anyone in real life and I was fully in control. Now I'm slowly starting to let go of control a little bit so that I can perform in real life and show my work in this whole new perspective. I think that's only going to evolve. I'm testing the limits of how I can show my work in real life.
 
Your work is very much about how garments interact with the body, but in this exhibition the garments are presented more like sculptures and separate from the body. How do you think the context changes the way your work is perceived?
 
MS :
My pieces are designed so intrinsically with the body, but what I find is that sometimes when I show my pieces this way then the beauty of the piece gets lost. I focus on the tiniest, tiniest details in my garments, because I think they’re what add beauty to something. Sometimes when you put the corsets on, they get swallowed by the body and the real impact lies in how the body has been manipulated and is being shown. That's why I wanted to show my pieces off the body here. But they still refer to it so strongly that they almost look like living things. There’s a real sense of movement to them — there’s always something human and fleshy.
 
What do you want people to feel when they see this collection?
 
MS :
 
I want them to feel something. Someone commented on my Instagram the other day saying: "This is disgusting. I feel nothing". I get so many mixed reactions to my work, but I just want people to feel something — whether it's hate or love is up to them. I love that people have strong reactions to my work. If you're not pissing some people off, then I feel like you're not making progress.
 
Stark Naked at 35-37 rue des Francs-Bourgeois, 75004 Paris until 19 December.
 
Michaela Stark’s new designs morph the body to alien extremes. By Sophie Wilson.  i-D, December 10, 2021.

Historically, when it comes to picking out lingerie, most of us have been conditioned to look for the most flattering options, with garments that lift and support, highlight our ‘best bits’, and definitely don’t dig into our flesh all high on the agenda. It goes without saying that these outdated ideals of perfection, imposed on us by our patriarchal overlords and the mainstream media, are complete and utter bullshit – our lumps, bumps, and rolls are not the ‘imperfections’ we have been led to believe they are, but a completely normal side effect of being a human with a body, and even something to be celebrated.
 
Doing just that is rising Australia-born, Paris-based designer Michaela Stark, whose unconventional, couture-level lingerie accentuates and highlights the fleshy form and folds of the body. Crafted from delicate lace, silk, and chiffon, her corsets and bustiers are detailed with criss-crossing ribbons, straps, and seams that cut into their wearers’ breasts, torsos, and bums, with the soft, distorted mounds they create often feeling somewhere in the realm of sculpture.
 
With Stark’s namesake label born from her frustrations at not being able to find decent bras in her hometown (“an outlet store called ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry (Anymore)’ was the only place in my whole city that sold my size, but despite the name of the store, I cried literally every time I went there”), the designer started out making simple silk knickers and bloomers. Over time, her work evolved into the body-morphing styles currently making waves on Instagram.
 
Inspiration, she explains, comes from her own body hang-ups. “I’m inspired by all the parts of my body I feel insecure about. For me, that’s my stomach, my ‘love handles’, my ‘hip dips’, my boobs, the cellulite on my thighs, my butt and… I also want to say the tops of my arms, but this is a relatively recent thing,” she says, adding that working through her feelings of insecurity is a major part of her design process. “It can be an emotional process, as some days I just want to avoid my reflection altogether.”
 
Counting Beyoncé as a fan, after she created looks for 2018 video “Apeshit” and upcoming visual album Black is King, later this year Stark is also set to open her first exhibition. Here, we get to know her a little better.
 
 

 
Hey Michaela! Could you tell me a little about the themes of your work and what it’s all about? 
 
Michaela Stark: My work is about celebrating the parts of the body that society usually makes us feel insecure about, through lingerie that accentuates the ‘imperfections’ of the body – the fat rolls, bulges, cellulite, uneven breasts, body hair etc. My aim is to counteract all the prescribed beauty norms that have been force fed to us through the fashion and beauty industries.
 
How did you get your start in fashion? 
 
Michaela Stark: I started out as a seamstress in London, working in-house for several young British fashion labels. It was really exciting for me at the time, as I was so young and had just graduated from fashion school in Australia. Being thrown into the London scene like this really opened my eyes up to the opportunities of the industry and the endless possibilities within  it. 
 
Eventually, I started working with celebrity stylists as a personal tailor and costume designer, which gave me so many majorly exciting opportunities, like going on tour with Beyoncé and Jay Z, and working with big fashion brands to design and tailor garments seen on a world scale. I think mostly though, it gave the skills to be able to sew intricate and very technical garments for an array of body types – not just fashion models. 
 
Why did you make the move from clothing into lingerie?
 
Michaela Stark: I’ve always loved lingerie – it makes me feel sexy and just gives me a lot of confidence. When I’m wearing it, I feel like I’m playing out a fantasy, almost tapping into an alter-ego. Being a plus-size girl, whose 32FF breasts came pretty much right on puberty, I’d always felt a bit left out of the lingerie game. From the age of 14-19 I had to shop at an outlet story called ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry (Anymore)’ because it was the only place in the city that sold my size. As I’m sure you can imagine, stores like this don’t stock the beautiful, delicate lingerie that I so desperately desired, and every experience going there was totally mortifying.
 
 
Can you tell me a little about how you create your lingerie? What is the process behind it?
 
Michaela Stark: Each piece is completely one-of-a-kind and can take up to a month to make because they’re so intricate. I guess you could say I’m working as a ‘counter-couturier’ of sorts. Couturiers engineer their garments to solely focus on hiding and enhancing the body. My work is not so much the hiding – it’s more enhancing, enhancing, enhancing! I use the same techniques couturiers use to make the parts we usually don’t want others to see bigger and more prominent. I want to celebrate the body, not hide it away.
 
In terms of aesthetics, I would say my lingerie is unapologetically feminine. The pieces are soft, romantic, and colourful, and I love to use delicate silks and very feminine, sensual silhouettes. It’s really important to me that each piece is specifically designed to perfectly fit and complement the body of the person who is going to wear it, whether that’s myself or a client.

 
Where do you find inspiration?
 
Michaela Stark: I mostly use myself as a model and I’m inspired by all the parts of my body that I feel insecure about – working through my feelings is a major part of my design process. I always start with my own body and a loosely fitting garment, which I drape over myself while looking in the mirror, although some days I just want to avoid my reflection altogether. When I’ve draped the garment over myself, I try to sculpt it to accentuate the part I feel most insecure about in that moment. I’ll continue to manipulate my body until I feel I’ve made my ‘imperfections’ look beautiful. When I feel happy with my cellulite or fat rolls or whatever, then I know I have my final shape and can move on to the pattern cutting part. 
 
You talk about feeling insecure about your body, but your pictures evoke a huge amount of confidence. How do you channel this energy when you’re being photographed?
 
Michaela Stark: Wearing lingerie is kind of like wearing armour for me. It makes me feel confident and allows me to channel this fantasy alter-ego version of myself. My photographs, which are usually self-portraits, are as much a part of my art as the lingerie is. By the time I’ve reached this stage, I’ve already been through all the emotional labour. I’ve tackled my insecurities and created a garment that allows me to feel beautiful in my own skin, so in the photos I emanate a sense of confidence because I really am feeling confident. It also helps that I’m taking the photo – it means I’m in control of the image and of how my body and sexuality is going to be portrayed. It’s important I feel confident in the photos, because the whole point is to help others who see my work to feel safe about their own insecurities and imperfections. I hope my confidence rubs off on them!

 
 
What about when you collaborate with a photographer?
 
Michaela Stark: Oh there’s a huge difference, and you can really see it in the images. My work is already quite vulnerable and it can have a lot of sexual connotations, so when someone else photographs me, I feel like it’s very easy for me to become an object of desire. I am modelling, almost naked, for someone else, and they’re pushing their vision of beauty on me – I’m no longer in control of how my body and sexuality is going to be portrayed. But it’s nice to give up this control sometimes, and I love seeing myself through someone else’s lens. It just has to be the right team, and a photographer who’s willing to understand my perspective and hear my creative input.
 
The way you present your lingerie and images feels incredibly sculptural to me. Is this something intentional?
 
Michaela Stark: I’m actually working on an exhibition where I’ll be hanging and selling my lingerie as sculptures, so you’re spot on the money. Inside Me will be shown through Gillian Jason Gallery in London at the end of the year, in collaboration with Alina Zamanova, a painter and sculptor from Kiev. After I’ve worn an item I’ve made, and photographed myself in it, I don’t consider it an item of clothing, but a sculpture that reveals a certain part of my body and my mind. I feel that, even without a body inside, they can stand as beautiful art works that are as intimate as a nude photograph. 
 
Given social media’s censorship rules, it must be hard to present the kind of work you make. How do you navigate this?
 
Michaela Stark: It’s insanely difficult! I think this a big challenge for most artists trying to liberate the female body. At this stage, Instagram removes pretty much any photo I upload, even if there is no nudity. They have absolute power to police my body however they like. The sad truth of the matter is that women, and plus-size women particularly, are being censored more than anyone else. It’s sad because I think the fact that they have this power means artists are forced to comply by their rules.
 
When it comes to your clients, who is the person you’re designing for?
 
Michaela Stark: I love the challenge of designing for other people. It’s not something that I do regularly at the moment, but definitely something I’m working towards. It’s quite intimate to think about what someone else is going to want to wear, and what will make them feel beautiful. Beyoncé has been pretty much the only client to date I’ve had since launching my own brand! Now, I want to throw myself into it, and start learning about other people’s flaws and insecurities. If I could regularly design for other people like I do for myself, it would add a whole new dimension to my work.
 
Michaela Stark’s lingerie accentuates body parts we’re conditioned to hide. By Emma Elizabeth Davidson. Dazed, July 30, 2020. 

Michaela Stark website

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