Adriana Bertini
Issue #31
Couture gets a condom-ation
By Elizabeth Barker
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
The dress might be the most fabulous dancing frock you’ve ever seen: slinky enough for flamenco but delicate like a ballerina’s costume. With all the crinkly texture of pressed roses, its extravagant neckline and bodice clings tight before giving way to a rush of ruffles more silky-soft than a thousand pink, red, and white petals.
But nothing as mundanely lovely as flowers was spared in bringing this fanciful thing to life. Like all of the garments created by its Brazilian designer, 35-year-old Adriana Bertini, the dress is made entirely of condoms.
“I want to create a new meaning for the condom,” says Bertini, whose exhibition Dress Up Against AIDS: Condom Couture opened on World AIDS Day (December 1, 2006) at UCLA’s Fowler Museum and runs until March 11, 2007. “Some people find it difficult to accept that using condoms is necessary, but when you look at these dresses you begin to associate protection with pleasure.”
Flashing a riot of color reminiscent of a blowout street carnival, the 14 pieces featured in Dress Up Against AIDS include a minimum of 500 condoms each. Bertini has partnered with a number of companies who hand over products that are defective, expired, or rejects from quality control tests (thus keeping a whole lot of latex from ending up in landfills, a victory for the longtime Greenpeace volunteer). Since 1997, the sculptor and former accessories designer has dreamed up more than 200 subliminally safe sex–promoting creations, including a wedding dress fashioned from about 80,000 condoms.
Learning to transform that slippery, unbeautiful material into couture-quality fabric has proved a happy adventure for Bertini. “I’ve developed 80 gluing methods, 35 cutting techniques, and 60 types of collage,” she says. “With dyeing, it took about six years to get the results I wanted. But that’s what’s really fascinating in art — going through all the different processes to discover how to create the effects you want.”
An activist since age 14, Bertini first found her inspiration in a group of HIV-positive children she met while volunteering for an AIDS prevention group. Today she continues to do community outreach, sometimes visiting women’s prisons to speak about safe sex and even to enlist the prisoners’ help in preparing condoms for her artwork.
Despite their ingenious take on wearing condoms as defense against AIDS, Bertini’s gowns, skirts, tops, and suits aren’t meant to be sported and shown off. The pieces essentially function as sculptures, although several have been slipped on for fashion shows over the past few years. Still, Bertini says her collections effectively communicate her motto that “condoms must be basic like a pair of jeans and so necessary like a great love.”
“When you look at these dresses, you’re unconsciously thinking about condom use in your own life,” says Bertini, who plans to work on a line of condom-based, medieval-influenced menswear next. “And when you leave, you’re probably going to talk about it with other people, which means my message has been spread. Everything is designed so that people come away from the exhibition thinking about the importance of protection.”
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