Michal Sella and Yarden Haber met on their first day at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and, in their words, have “barely been apart since.” They studied together, then worked together, then moved in together, and MICHÈLLE JOURDAN grew out of that closeness. Both had a strong pull towards leather and shoemaking specifically, and a shared appreciation for precision and hard physical work, the kind of overlap that made the partnership feel instinctive rather than negotiated. Their final project in the BA programme, a 28-piece collection built entirely by their own hands, became the first place they could fully bring that shared language together.
That shared language is clearest in Look 5. A pair of hollow leather thighs, grafted onto a bodysuit like a second anatomy, began as a 3D scan of a model’s body. Sella and Haber digitally modelled the new forms, printed them, then built over them the way a shoemaker builds a boot: a structured lining first, then leather stretched and shaped around it. The result is clothing that doesn’t sit on the body so much as rewrite it.
The project’s starting point was the word “witch” itself, and the contradiction built into it. Historically used to punish women perceived as too powerful, too knowledgeable, or too different, the label has functioned as a tool of control. Sella and Haber wanted to take it back. “For us, the witch represents a woman who refuses to be contained,” they explained. Not a fantasy character, but a figure that carries ideas of power, sexuality, knowledge, and resistance, a potential, they say, that exists within every woman rather than one specific woman.
Translating that into 28 handmade garments meant resisting the obvious move. “We did not want to make ‘witch costumes,’” they said. Instead, they worked to build the qualities associated with the witch, mystery, danger, resistance, transformation, directly into construction and material. Chrome-tanned and vegetable-tanned leather, aluminium, synthetic organza and PLA gave them a material vocabulary that could swing between softness and rigidity, protection and exposure, in the same piece.
That tension carries through the silhouettes, which were designed to feel strong and slightly unsettling rather than conventionally flattering, some emphasising the body, others distorting, extending, or obscuring it. Crucially, the garments weren’t designed in isolation and fitted to bodies afterwards; Sella and Haber built the collection around their models’ specific proportions and movement from the outset, treating the body as something to design in dialogue with, and sometimes against. “We wanted the wearer to feel powerful inside the garments,” they said, “rather than simply look powerful from the outside.”
Craft sits at the centre of that process, particularly wet moulding, a technique in which leather is shaped while damp. The damp leather needs a lot of physical pressure to take its final form, which it then holds as it dries. It is demanding, often frustrating work, but one they describe as central to the meaning of the pieces themselves: “There is something powerful in the relationship between hard physical labour and beauty. We love that the effort is not hidden, it becomes part of the object.”
That same instinct extended to their use of digital tools, which they don’t treat as separate from craft but as another way of getting an idea into physical form. In some pieces, 3D-printed forms became a base to build leather over, as with Look 5. In others, printed objects served only as templates for moulds, eventually cast in metal, the print itself a step, not the destination. “We do not see traditional craft and digital fabrication as opposites,” they said. “We see them as different tools that allow us to translate imagination into reality.” Much of that range came directly from Bezalel’s structure, which teaches fashion alongside goldsmithing, shoemaking, and accessory design, a framework Sella and Haber credit with letting them move freely between disciplines rather than committing to just one.
With the collection complete, the pair are aiming to grow MICHÈLLE JOURDAN into a full-fledged brand, eventually building a platform to sell, rent, or take commissions for pieces, while also pursuing costume and performance work that pushes further past everyday clothing. But they’re clear that the project was never only about the witch as historical figure. It became, they said, a way of thinking about themselves as women, designers, and makers, an attempt to build something that “does not ask permission to take up space.”
