Artemisi is making the future of fashion by hand

At São Paulo Fashion Week, Mayari Jubini delivered a collection of sculptural silhouettes, elaborate embellishment and futuristic fantasy

Fashion has become increasingly fascinated with the future, particularly the possibilities of artificial intelligence, digital design and automated production. Yet at São Paulo Fashion Week, Brazilian designer Mayari Jubini offered a compelling reminder that some of fashion's most futuristic creations still depend on an extraordinarily old-fashioned resource: human hands.

For Artemisi's latest collection, presented on 14 October during SPFW N61, Jubini brought together sculptural construction, anatomical forms, metallic surfaces and painstaking embellishment in 28 looks that seemed designed for a world somewhere between science fiction and haute couture.

The contradiction was deliberate. In an industry increasingly captivated by technology, Jubini emphasized the labor behind her designs, explaining that some garments require more than a thousand hours of manual work. The resulting collection looked almost digitally generated, but its complexity was overwhelmingly physical.

The craftsmanship behind the spectacle

Artemisi has established a recognizable identity through its theatrical silhouettes and unconventional materials, often creating garments that occupy the territory between clothing, sculpture and performance costume. This season, that vocabulary became particularly elaborate. Floor-length dresses were covered entirely in embroidery, producing garments of considerable weight. Corsets were finished with long fringes of oversized bugle beads, while metallic capes resembled overlapping fish scales. A coordinated jacket and trouser ensemble combined hand-painted surfaces with crystal embellishment.

The collection's more futuristic elements incorporated 3D printing, including anatomical breastplate-like tops, masks and rigid structures positioned at the hips to alter the body's silhouette. Yet even these technologically produced components required extensive polishing, finishing and varnishing by hand. This relationship between advanced production methods and traditional craftsmanship gave the collection its most interesting dimension. Technology was not presented as a replacement for the maker, but as another tool within an intensely labor-driven creative process.

There was also something refreshing about Jubini's unapologetic commitment to visual extravagance. Fashion has spent years discussing restraint, versatility and the commercial virtues of understated luxury. Artemisi seems entirely uninterested in that conversation. Its clothes demand attention, frequently exaggerating the body rather than attempting to flatter it according to conventional proportions.

Some pieces resembled wearable armor, others decorative exoskeletons. Embellishment was not simply applied to a finished garment but became part of its structure, determining how the fabric moved and how the body appeared beneath it. The results were occasionally closer to stage costume than conventional ready-to-wear, but that is not necessarily a criticism. Artemisi has already attracted performers including Katy Perry and Demi Lovato, whose stage wardrobes require the kind of exaggerated visual identity that Jubini creates so confidently.

Beyond the celebrity wardrobe

What made the presentation more interesting was the designer's attempt to expand that identity beyond performance dressing. Alongside the most elaborate pieces were embroidered lace corsets, chain tops with fetish-inspired detailing, structured jacquard minidresses and feather-covered skirts. These were hardly ordinary wardrobe staples, but they suggested a more accessible interpretation of Artemisi's theatrical language.

Jubini has argued that her customers do not necessarily want conventional clothes. They are attracted precisely to the experimentation and spectacle that distinguish her work. It is an important distinction in a luxury market that often assumes commercial relevance requires creative compromise.

Still, the collection raises questions about how successfully such an elaborate aesthetic can translate beyond the runway. The most sculptural garments function beautifully as visual statements, but their weight, rigidity and dramatic proportions inevitably limit their everyday possibilities. The challenge for Artemisi is not to make those pieces less ambitious, but to develop a broader wardrobe that carries the same creative identity.

There were promising indications of that balance here. The smaller silhouettes retained the collection's fascination with structure and embellishment without demanding an entire stage production around them.

Ultimately, Artemisi's most persuasive achievement was not simply producing clothes that looked futuristic. It was demonstrating how much human knowledge, time and physical effort can exist inside an object that appears almost technologically impossible.

As fashion explores what machines might eventually be capable of creating, Jubini is making a rather convincing argument for what they cannot easily replace: the obsessive, imperfect and exceptionally skilled work of the human hand.

At São Paulo Fashion Week, the future of fashion looked remarkably handmade.