When Giannis Siganos of Mr. Vertigo, the mind behind the Bacchae Wine Fair, approached us, little did we know what awaited, or rather, how much it would spark our imagination. Every year, he stages this alternative fair in Athens devoted to natural wines. He brings together Greek producers working with organic and biodynamic practices, indigenous yeasts, and a philosophy of letting things unfold. But the fair is never just about wine. There’s music, DJs, people moving, talking, tasting - and always, ART. Each year, he invites an artist from a different medium (spanning painting, music, design, photography, you name it) to respond to a single theme: the Bacchae. Not out of obligation, but from his genuine love of art.
Being asked to design for the 2026 edition felt like the perfect challenge.
Our starting point
When you wear a garment, you inherit the imprint of another body. Every fold, every seam traces someone else. Even a custom piece begins before you, shaped by a body that came first. As designers, we always begin somewhere: with a fitting model, a standard size, a body that isn’t our own.
But what if the body itself became the origin? What if each body became its own garment?
That question shaped our approach for the Bacchae project.
We began with Mnemosyne
Our desire was to preserve the body in this exact moment. This exact shape in time.
In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory and the mother of the Muses. Before writing existed, memory was everything. Stories, histories, identities were held in the body, repeated, carried forward.
Because the body is never still. It shifts, ages, transforms. Nothing about it is fixed. And yet, like a photograph capturing light for a fraction of a second, we wanted to hold it, just for a moment, through fabric and thread.
Red came instinctively
Partly, of course, because of the wine. But also because of the Bacchae themselves, as figures of intensity, movement and trance. In The Bacchae of Euripides, they exist in a state of constant motion, somewhere between ecstasy and rupture.
For us, they are energy. They are movement.
That’s something we wanted to carry through the entire project, through the garments and the way they were documented. The campaign images never settle. The body is always in motion.
There’s also sound. Music runs through the installation, looping, interrupting, insisting. It creates a kind of continuous state, a subtle trance that envelops you in slowly.
The making of
We invited women of different ages, shapes, and backgrounds to take part. Some were close friends, some family, others people we admire; sculptors, scientists, artists, brilliant minds in completely different fields.
A chorus began to form.
Each woman entered a cocoon of red chiffon. We worked slowly, by hand. Thread followed the body. First, the imprint. Then the details that make each person singular: freckles, scars, lines, tattoos.
(We have to admit, it was a lot of fun, even if each tracing took us several hours - and to be more specific SUMMER hours!)
From Behind-the-Scenes to the Forefront
After nine months of dedication, we were ready to bring our artwork into the spotlight at Romantso in downtown Athens, nearly two weeks ago.
The Event
For us, the Bacchae is a way of thinking about the body today. About female liberation. About identity. About women existing together, as a collective force.
A modern Dionysian chorus: alive, moving, and entirely their own.