A stretch mark, rendered in lace coated with latex until the texture reads like skin. An appliqué, sewn by hand, standing in for pubic hair. In Artem Gorobetc’s collection The Tone of Voice, the physical details most people are taught to conceal become the decoration itself, not the flaw, but the point.
Gorobetc, who is based in Florence, developed the collection as his MA graduation collection at Polimoda. The project treats clothing and the body as a form of communication, and everything in it, from print to silhouette, was built around one question: what happens in the gap between what we mean to say with our appearance and what other people end up reading into it?
“I’m interested in how much we communicate about ourselves before we even start speaking,” Gorobetc says. “Clothing affects how people perceive us, what groups they associate us with, and what they expect from us. At the same time, our intention does not always match someone else’s interpretation.” That mismatch between intention and interpretation is what the collection is built to sit inside.
The title carries the same idea. “The same phrase can be said with a different tone of voice and its meaning can completely change,” he explains. “Something similar happens with clothing: it is not only the garments themselves that matter, but also the way they are combined, the materials, the silhouette.” For Gorobetc, dressing can be a direct statement, or it can work more like what he calls “aesopian language”, a way of protecting something personal without saying it outright.
That instinct toward concealment runs through the collection’s central argument: that the informal rules around how a person is expected to look function as a kind of censorship. “We usually associate censorship with restrictions on speech,” Gorobetc says. “But there are also unspoken restrictions on how a person is expected to look. Certain bodies and physical features are considered acceptable, while others are expected to be corrected, concealed, or removed from view.” There doesn’t need to be a formal rule, he points out, the expectation of judgment alone is enough to make people edit themselves before anyone else does it for them.
Gorobetc built the collection around features usually asked to disappear: body hair, cellulite, stretch marks, the body’s natural texture. Rather than smoothing them out, he worked them directly into the garments. The latex-coated lace and the hand-made appliqués sit inside that same logic: decorative techniques built out of what is normally kept out of sight.
That doesn’t make the collection a simple argument for exposure. It moves through different degrees of openness, from protective outerwear and tailoring to sheer layers and lacing, and it treats covering up as a personal choice as much as a constraint. Concealment can be comfortable and can protect something private, while being visible doesn’t automatically mean being free. “It was important for me to explore the contradictions in the way we perceive the body without equating exposure with freedom or concealment with restriction,” Gorobetc says. That tension sits alongside the project’s questions about appearance norms, not beneath them.
The artist Michaela Stark was a direct reference point, particularly her use of corsetry, pressure, and fabric tension to reshape the body’s proportions. Gorobetc applied some of the same principles across several garments, treating, in his words, “the natural features of the body as a starting point for design rather than something that needs to be corrected or disguised.”
Typography does similar work on the surface of the clothes. The collection’s prints are built from ASCII art, images formed entirely out of letters, numbers, and symbols. Gorobetc was drawn to the technique partly for what it signals: “ASCII art not only transforms text into an image, but for me it is also strongly associated with digital environments and the internet culture of the 2000s.” Since so much of daily communication now happens through typed text, the prints let written language sit literally on the body, connecting the collection’s two forms of communication, through text and through appearance, on the same surface.
Getting the concept to hold up as clothing, rather than as an idea that needed explaining, was the hardest part of the process. “I didn’t want the clothes simply to illustrate the text,” Gorobetc says. “I was constantly questioning where the idea was already being communicated through the material and construction, and where I was trying to compensate for its absence through explanation.” Polimoda pushed that instinct further, he adds, with tutors repeatedly asking whether the proportions worked, whether the material choices were justified, whether the finishing held up on its own.
Gorobetc isn’t interested in handing viewers a single takeaway. “I didn’t set out to communicate one specific message to the viewer,” he says. “This is a clothing collection inspired by my own observations and reflections… Everyone is free to interpret the collection in their own way.” What he does hope for is smaller and more personal: that people who encounter the work feel a little more comfortable in their own bodies, and a little less inclined to edit themselves before anyone asks them to.
