[A]Dressing the Dead: Garments for the Grave

Pia Interlandi is a fashion designer, artist, funeral celebrant, and teacher based in Melbourne, Australia. She often incorporates ideas of death, ritual, and transformation into her unique designs, and has even designed clothing for burial, informed by a fascination with human biology and death as a scientific and psychological concept. While studying Design, the artist began dissecting garments and experimenting with dissolvable fabrics, which led to her current PhD study, [A]Dressing Death: Garments for the Grave.

As part of this study, Pia has researched the effects of clothing on decomposition, and has incorporated dissolvable fabrics as a method of exploring life’s transient qualities – an unexpected marriage of science and art. As a result of this study, much of Pia’s current work is focused on designing burial garments and becoming part of the ritual as a person who has died is prepared for disposition.

“Knowing that there is something that will gradually unwrap the body, and reuniting it with the earth, with almost a sense of poetry, takes some of the fear out of burial.”

In an interview with The Daily Undertaker, Pia said:

“When designing I have undergone rigorous testing to determine the rate of fabric and fibre deterioration. Whilst these results are scientific they have meant that I can design my garments with intentional stages of transformation. I believe that these transformations, whilst indeed unseen, and therefore secret, are reassuring to the living. Knowing that there is something that will gradually unwrap the body, and reuniting it with the earth, with almost a sense of poetry, takes some of the fear out of burial.”