Artist Statement
For nearly 100 years, couturiers have been the ultimate artists. By defining beauty through shape, volume, texture, and line, they showed us a new form of art.
I think, feel, and see like a couturier.
Couturiers tell stories. They convey emotions through clothes. My work tries to do the same, using the very materials that once made the best of Haute Couture. I fell in love with Haute Couture because I believe it exists purely for beauty.
Since 2013, I've devoted myself to this, knowing that behind its beauty lies the precision, calculation and even geometry of exceptional craftsmanship. No great art is possible without it.
Through systematic and meticulous work, using old tools to make something new, I transform the best I’ve seen on the Paris runway, applying the same attention to detail and the same exacting care to create a new form of art, Abstract Couture®.
Every famous couturier also had the most exquisite gardens. Designing a garden and designing a collection are one in the same. Fashion was the couturier’s first love, and gardens were the second. They spent as much time on their gardens as they did on their collections.
Each piece I design requires endless hours of study, almost as if I'm proving a theorem with multiple images and ideas. It’s a theorem as dependent on the orderliness of math (which I’ve always loved) as the chaos of creativity — about order versus disorder and pattern versus the pattern-less.
Color is often my starting point, a constant around which everything else revolves. Along with couturiers Hubert de Givenchy and Karl Lagerfeld, contemporary art, which centers on color and shape, has influenced me as much as fashion, particularly the artists Josef Albers and Donald Judd.
These masters have done what I love best, turning complexity into simplicity without losing depth, making their creations easy to absorb and yet eternal.
I invite the viewer to share my relationship with materials, volumes, shapes, and textures, and enter the intricate, painstaking process that defined great couture, to celebrate it even as it fades from view in today’s ultra-commercialized fashion world.
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You can view Devi’s complete CV here.