Natasha Zinko Spring 2025 - London Fashion Week.

(Natasha Zinko Spring 2025)

Multi talented Ukrainian designer Natasha Zinko, is relatively new to the fashion world, with her first lookbook collection revealed in 2016 as her whimsical "Sunday morning in Ukraine" array, which offered a glimpse of her soon-to-be Avant-garde aesthetics.  After morphing her signature label from jewelry design to fashion design, she very much personifies that latent Eastern European underground raver inspired, postmodernist, anti-fashion ethos, which the Georgian born Gvasalia brothers of Vetements and Balenciaga fame have encapsulated within the last Ten years of their tenure.  Yet, Zinco's tweak on the said stylizations, have certainly set in place her own originality, whilst portraying a unique eccentricity to her label.

And with her Spring 2025 "PLASTIC" collection for London Fashion Week at the Oval Space in London, Zinko's curiosity with the morbidity of modern life, has shined through once gain.  And according to attendees of her recent runway show, the invitations that were sent out portrayed an actual chest x-ray of a woman with breast implants, with a warning that Zinco's fictional Plastic Surgery clinic will not be liable for any discomfort caused, and that any legal action has resulted in bankruptcies of the unfortunate few, who have pursued claims for their botched up cosmetic surgery.  Note the mock, post surgery bruised faces of the models.  Zinko's anti-fashion humour, as noted earlier, very much aligns with Demna Gvasalia of Balenciaga fame, which can be hard to gauge at times whether his intention for shock value is in fact a neurotically laced, contrarian backlash.  Attended for an audience of prudish invitees, which don't really exist.

Either way, Zinko's PLASTIC collection, holds more of an endearing desire for that medical fetish which, as a sexual fetish, has stood the test of time.   To erotise the intrusiveness of medical procedures, in which the late UK writer J.G. Ballad of his own 'Ballardian' fame decreed that doom, violence, death and yes, various medical processes all hold an eroticism, manifested solely by the human condition.  That, in times of stress appear to become more pronounced.  And we are all bearing witness to an extraordinary unstable and stressful world. 

So are we dormant in our fetishes?  Probably, and it's probably better to admit it, than suppress the urges, otherwise in its detriment, it will descend into the taboo.  Yet, Zinko's collection with its plastic wrapped, surgical experiments, is of her own dystopian inclination.  That somewhat works, noting her oversized, yet tailored and fitted cuts, which are exceptional.  However, the indulgent eccentricness that Zinko delivers from her runway shows can be tiring for an audience, and repetition of any artist is a notorious destroyer of creativity.  So far, the London based Ukrainian designer has been able to balance on that fine line.

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(A.Glass 2024)