Cover image credit: Nikita Sklaruk for Elinor Shahar agency
The first look in Yuval Fine’s graduation collection is a leather jacket with a single opened void cutting through the body. It is the second version. Fine had almost finished a leather blazer with two asymmetrical openings when it started to feel untrue to its reference, and not disturbing enough. Then a teacher called to say he couldn’t stop thinking about how wrong two holes were. She agreed and started again from scratch, this time with one opening.
The reference was a Giacometti sculpture. Its body was so damaged that Fine became curious how a body like that would be dressed. Giacometti’s figures, she says, seem to exist “somewhere between presence and disappearance,” and the void became a recurring element across the collection. The sculptures also shaped a textile she developed, a fabric or leather that gradually dissolves into transparent mesh, a way of moving from dense material to almost nothing.
The project began earlier, with an exhibition on Jewish burial shrouds at the Israel Museum. Fine first explored the subject in a tailored menswear course at the University of Haifa School of Design, where she arrived after studying architecture and deciding, in her last month there, to switch to fashion. When the graduation collection began, she kept researching and read about the Jewish belief in resurrection, which became a way to explore body and soul, spirit and matter, utopia and dystopia. “I wanted to capture a moment where a decaying body is growing from the ground, taking form again,” Fine says.
Fine grew up secular, and approaches these traditions from a cultural position rather than a religious one. Jewish texts, rituals and objects are part of the visual language she grew up around, and that distance made it easier to ask questions freely. Resurrection became a way to think about memory and identity: what remains of a person, what disappears, and what would have to be rebuilt for someone to become recognisable again.
The rituals themselves fed the clothes. Fine found a series of 19 paintings made in Prague in the 18th and 19th centuries, each showing a step of the burial ritual performed by the Jewish burial society. They helped her understand the characters of the story and start forming her own. The mourning ritual of tearing a garment became another look, combined with the dissolving textile. “The garment carries evidence of the spirit,” Fine says. “An expression of pain through matter.” Across the collection, garments are interrupted, opened, framed or rebuilt, so that the disruption becomes part of the new form.
Leather carries most of this. Fine chose it for mortality and reconstruction, and for its weight next to softer, more delicate fabrics, which sets what remains against what disappears. The surface technique began by accident in her second year, when a laser engraving on leather ran too intense and peeled the top layer, exposing the suede underneath. With a deadline close and no spare material, she kept peeling the pattern by hand. Now the method is deliberate. A graphic is drawn digitally and laser-engraved, then carved by hand. “The laser is controlled and precise, while the hand carving is slower and much less predictable,” Fine says, and the finished surface carries traces of both.
The most exposed look is a leather panel engraved with a spine and ribcage, which she describes as the most extreme state of destruction in the collection. It is meant to show what remains after everything else has decayed, and what everything could grow from again. To place the drawing accurately, Fine drew the skeleton directly on the model at the toile fitting, then built it into the digital pattern. Every seam affected the image. The two darts at the back of the trousers meant rotating the drawing to match. The leather had to be cut and engraved in one go, with only one attempt. Once sewn, it was cut by hand directly on the model.
Smaller objects carry the project as clearly. Fine made the tzitzit, the traditional wool fringe attached to a four-cornered garment, from leather strings, multiplied almost obsessively until they turned “heavy and rough” and became part of the garment’s structure. The tallit bags, traditionally velvet with embroidery, come from a moment she remembers: seeing an elegantly dressed man carry one like a clutch. “I remember thinking it was the most stylish thing I ever saw.”
The hardest part, Fine says, was balancing concept and clothing. The research was heavy, and the garments could easily have become literal illustrations of it. “I wanted them to work as well made, desirable clothes first,” she says, and the difficult decisions were often about removing things rather than adding them.
Next, Fine wants to keep working where traditional menswear, Jewish material culture and experimental leather craft meet, starting with tallit and tefillin bags, and to keep studying tailoring. Some references are specifically Jewish, but she sees the questions as universal: “what remains of us, how we remember people, and how the body carries identity.”
