Rarely do the lines between Art, Fashion, and Poetry blur enough to merge in an irrefutable way. The project Ellas is one of those rare cases. If, from the beginning, I was struck by the conceptual strength of the project, witnessing it unfold year after year, taking shape through the construction of the dress, has been an honor.
In Ellas, Heroica — under the direction of Andrea Rivera — ceases to be only a fashion brand and becomes a living reflection on the feminine. What began as an aesthetic pursuit has transformed into an exercise in self-reflection: a poetic and subversive space where the image of the complacent woman is deconstructed, giving rise to a complex, multiple, and ever-changing character.
Through this project, its creator enters alterity and the spirit of punk as spaces of resistance: alterity as a place of observation and empathy, and punk as a gesture of refusal toward what has been established. In that intersection emerges the need to rename — to say things again from another place — because, as feminism reminds us, “what is not named does not exist.”
The project is structured around four female archetypes that the artist draws from the book The Four Women of God. The designer takes the liberty of rewriting them — as an act of freedom, resistance, perhaps even subversion itself. From there emerge Necia, Narcisa, Hechizada, and Bendita. Each of these archetypes becomes a collection.
Each one embodies a facet of the feminine imaginary inherited from Christian tradition, where woman has been shaped between boredom, vanity, wisdom, and grace. In Ellas, these archetypes are not presented as fixed figures, but as states of transition: they rotate, mutate, and intertwine throughout life.
“We are not only one. We are all of them, at different moments,” says the designer. This statement is the conceptual core of Ellas: a collective portrait built through personal letters. In them, the creator writes, questions herself, and exposes herself. Each letter is a hypothesis about herself and about the archetype she embodies: an intimate text that becomes a collection, where theory is translated into silhouettes, materials, and constructions.
In Necia, the first of the four, “the flower is dead, but it adorns.” Her sin is boredom. In Narcisa, the mirror fragments and the image is reconstructed: a metaphor about guilt, desire, and the possibility of claiming one’s own gaze. The portraits that compose Ellas are not abstractions; they are real bodies, beings that inhabit contradiction.
In dialogue with the tradition of The Three Graces — symbols of beauty, joy, and abundance — Heroica proposes a contemporary revision: a new feminine typology that does not seek to fit in, but to exist with authenticity.
Through Ellas, fashion becomes a tool for thought. It is not only about dressing, but about reclaiming, recognizing, and honoring the multiple ways of being a woman. In this gesture of subversion, the artist recovers the power to name, to resist, and to tell herself again from within.
This text was written in October 2025. At the time, Necia and Narcisa had been created. Two collections remain to be launched in order to complete the cycle of four archetypes.
Autora: Alejandra La Rotta Negrette
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