Melitta Baumeister: Plastic Silicone Sculptural Items

IN THE WEEKLY RUBRIC "NEW MARK" Wonderzine presents young designers and tells where and how you can buy their things. Our heroine this week is German Melitta Baumeister, specializing in avant-garde items of impressive sculptural forms.

Melitta Baumeister was born in Germany, but studied in the USA. In 2013, she graduated from the famous Parsons School of Design in New York. There, at the New York Fashion Week, her podium debut took place, and the graduation collection of the 27-year-old Baumeister attracted the attention of Catherine Zarella from Style.com. The critics liked the aesthetics of the young designer: she took classic things like a white shirt as a basis and sewed them out of materials resembling rubber and foam. In fact, Baumeister used silicone, which she shaped into a plastic state. Melitta said that in this way she wanted to capture the memory of things - because today the fact of preserving the memories, for example, as a photo on Instagram, is more important than the memory itself. Later, the Baumeister collection also came to the Parsons School exhibition, which was overseen by designer Diane von Furstenberg.

In the FW 2014 season, the online platform VFILES, which we recently talked about, chose Melitta to participate in her show on New York Fashion Week. In addition to this in the mentors she got the stylist Mel Ottenberg. And soon the black coat of Melitta Baumeister was put on Paris Fashion Week by the singer Rihanna herself - Ottenberg's ward. The girl’s clothes are also worn by Lady Gaga. Now Baumeister is preparing a solo show for the new season of New York Fashion Week. Check whether she will be able to make an independent show, we can in a couple of months.

I was born in a family of tailors and was always eager to create clothes. I studied fashion design for six years and it helped me to develop my own language. I want to create something advanced, to see fashion in advance. I work with silicone, but I want to evolve, therefore I am looking for new techniques for processing materials and cutting. But I may need this technique in the future. When you see your clothes on someone like Rihanna, you realize that you are doing things relevant to our time.