Sylvia Chen

The body is a sacred relic — fragile, mortal, and worthy of preservation. Ossuary conceives the garment as a living architectural structure, where Gothic verticality forms the bones and a corset-inspired foundation echoes Victorian ideals of bodily perfection and the constructed silhouette. The shell does not merely protect; it defines, compresses, and elevates — asserting that what encases us ultimately shapes how we are seen and how we see ourselves. Drawing from the deconstructed reverence of Maison Margiela, the dark romanticism of John Galliano, and the organic architecture of Iris van Herpen, the work investigates the tension between interior softness and exterior fortification. Like an ossuary itself — a sacred vessel built to hold what remains — this design preserves something vulnerable within something formidable, transforming the dressed body into a structure that is at once eternal and intimate, a skeleton and a sanctuary.