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Continuing our spotlight on the 2025 Portfoliobox Creative Grant winners, we’re thrilled to feature DZHUS, who earned 2nd place with this striking conceptual fashion portfolio. DZHUS' work stands at the intersection of art and design—thoughtful, expressive, and unapologetically bold.
Your work blends fashion with conceptual art. How would you describe your design philosophy?
DZHUS is a Ukrainian conceptual brand specialising in multi-purpose outfits, made of cruelty-free materials. Our pattern-making innovations help minimise physical shopping and create a versatile yet sustainable wardrobe from a few transformable garments. Not only does it save space and funds, but it also provides unlimited styling variants with a reduced environmental impact. I’ve been promoting this smart alternative, coordinating it with traditional sustainable practices: made-to-order production model, minimum-waste cut, local sourcing and manufacturing. Even our packaging tote is wearable as it transforms into a top. My main value, however, has always been humane treatment of animals. I consider animal-friendly ideology the only acceptable approach to design and life in general.
Has the current situation in Ukraine changed the way you work or the way you view your artistic mission?
I hadn’t incorporated any patriotic component in my design - until we’ve all faced the threat of elimination. A risk of dissolution of our authenticity in the overwhelming dirty wave of violence and profanity became an indicator of our true values and provoked a massive reconsideration of our identity. Alongside fellow Ukrainian artists, I now find it my duty to spread the Ukrainian culture worldwide via the fashion and art movement. I transmit our cultural code through the subtle symbolism I operate. Soon after my evacuation, I have reflected on this unique experience in the “TRANSIT” collection created for Berlin Fashion Week. Inspired by all kinds of containers in which people transported their belongings, I’ve designed exaggeratedly utilitarian silhouettes, some collected entirely from pockets, whereas others had foldable superstructures serving as bags or backpacks.
Many of your pieces feel like wearable statements. What are the key themes or messages you want to convey through your collections?
My entire creativity is missioned to evoke questions and reflections within the relevant existential narratives. Using abstract metaphors alone, I manage to provoke associations on the edge of the conventionally accepted. As a creator by nature, I find it a default solution to declare my internal struggle via cathartic art. The sharper a problem, the stronger the desire to bring it into a dialogue with my circle of kindred spirits around the world. By presenting our ethical fashion to the audience, we stress the necessity of being humane and future-oriented in the modern reality. The innovations DZHUS comes up with are aimed at changing the very approach to the consumption of a fashion product.
How do you balance avant-garde fashion with functionality and wearability?
I see the fashion of tomorrow as an efficient synthesis of ideological and utilitarian matters, celebrating ethics and technology in equal proportions. Via my multipurpose outfits, made of cruelty-free materials for individuals of all identities, I aim at breaking the stereotypes about ethical fashion being predictable and dull, and wearable art as impractical grotesque. Transformer clothing, saturated with a powerful concept, is a smart way to shift to a sustainable wardrobe avoiding limitations or repetitions, with your everyday self-styling experience enriched in newly discovered opportunities. It’s been extremely tough to keep working, as the industry is cruel. Effort and education may well be in vain, the more authentic a brand, the less vital business planning, no investment is a guarantee, strategies become a phantasmagoria, for each designer brand is a unique case. The problem of balancing work with private life just doesn’t exist, because it’s impossible to notice the borderline or even the difference. And having that said, I’m way not an outsider of the fashion world. I can only imagine the spectrum of concerns and the extent of desperation experienced by the creatives who were not lucky enough to win a grant, get featured in a magazine, or make it to a Fashion Week selection.
Your portfolio beautifully reflects your brand. How did you approach building and structuring your website with Portfoliobox?
I discovered Portfoliobox back in 2012, at the dawn of DZHUS. With no funds involved, I had to launch a website by myself, and despite my retrograde approach to technology, I’ve successfully built a structure transmitting the imagery of the brand. Later on, I’ve added e-commerce, which still functions as one of our main retail channels. I’ve since appreciated all the useful upgrades a lot, as the public's expectations have risen over the years. For DZHUS as a conceptual brand, it is crucial to convey its aesthetics and philosophy via such a major communication tool as the website. I’ve implemented our timeless minimalist vibe, focusing on the functionality of all the elements and the eloquence of the visual concepts, just as I approach fashion design.
Are there any specific projects or collections that are particularly meaningful to you right now?
DZHUS has been a sharply personal project for all 14 years of its existence, yet it’s been since the last few seasons that I’ve incorporated the cathartic component into its DNA. Having escaped the war comparatively smoothly, I’ve experienced extremely traumatic circumstances in my personal life. I’ve hence conveyed my struggle, in all its multi-layered hypostasis, in 3 collections, THESAURUS, ABSOLUTE, and ANTICON, as I went through the phases of my mutating condition. I received appreciative feedback from the audience, encouraged to come out with their own personal struggle. For me, as an artist spreading a humanist message, such a social effect was the highest reward.
What advice would you give to other creatives working through times of instability or displacement?
Having experienced evacuation from the war rather stoically, I suddenly broke into pieces upon a seemingly safe situation in my private life. In an attempt to recollect myself from debris, I have questioned a correlation between the natural human desire for self-discovery and the urge for homecoming, and ended up with an open question: "Can finding 'where you belong' in life replace the essential feeling of home?". I dedicated my new collection to my ‘inter-refuge’ escapist practice that appeared to be an effective coping strategy. Thus, my SS25 line speculates on the ‘Utopia codes’ generated by humanity in aspiration to program happiness. I’ve ironised about symbols throughout the entire history of mankind and have paid tribute to the world’s declared encoding systems, from spirituality to commodity. I’ve then suggested to exploit the civilisation’s eclectic semantics database to pave a path to a subjective idyll. In other words, any sign, term or notion is a metaphysical source of power that can serve as a vector to ‘self-settlement’, as a strategy for coping with existential dilemmas. Even randomised references may well, if not better, lead to a destination point.
What’s next for you—what are you currently working on, or dreaming about?
Despite being hopelessly technophobic myself, I realise that AI can correlate well with my forward-looking brand’s DNA and bring vivid practical benefits, from a full 3D database of our multipurpose garments’ transformations to time-saving digitalisation of the patternmaking routine, including testing a virtual prototype from diverse perspectives. Although I find the brand’s emotional connection with human models irreplaceable, I’m wondering what an adventure it would have been to unite the 2 realities under the dome of the DZHUS universe. Speaking of dreams, mine lay outside of the professional field, whilst I perceive DZHUS as my innovational mission, a duty towards the culture of fashion.
