Isabelle Violette

Isabelle Violette is a womenswear designer whose work merges fashion with memory, identity, and social reflection. Her practice is rooted in storytelling — often drawing on themes of erasure, femininity, and cultural narratives. Through conceptual collections, she explores how clothing can become a vessel for mourning, preservation, and emotional legacy.

In her graduate project, The Dress She’ll Never Wear, Isabelle Violette turns away from the glorification of violence in true crime culture and instead honours the life of victim Aiko Koo. Using symbolic fabric manipulation, ghostlike silhouettes, and references to ballet and Korean heritage, she creates garments that ask what it means to remember someone through design.

Violette’s broader interests span from archival femininity and grief aesthetics to quiet protest, beauty in vulnerability, and fashion as a form of resistance. Her work seeks to humanise what has been lost, creating space for soft power, delicate symbolism, and the stories society overlooks.

Aiko Koo: Origin and Identity – This spread introduces the starting point of the project, focusing on Aiko Koo’s Korean heritage and passion for ballet. Vintage photographs, feathers, and subtle overlays begin the process of translating memory into visual research, honouring who she was before she became a victim.

Remembering Through Words – Inspired by the idea of remembrance through language, this page weaves personal and poetic writing with research imagery. It reflects on loss, legacy, and the absence of voice, tying back to the project’s core: amplifying the identity of erased women.

Translating Ballet into Form – This sketchbook page explores the early translation of Aiko’s love of ballet into fabric movement. It combines draping experiments and historical tutu shapes with conceptual annotations, beginning to shape how motion and memory can co-exist in the final piece.

Pirouette in Progress – Documenting the physical development of the tutu, this page captures the technical experimentation behind the sculptural form. Inspired by the swirl of a pirouette frozen in time, it shows how movement was interpreted through layered fabric and gathered volume.

The Dress She’ll Never Wear – These final images present the completed garment: a memorial tutu dress created to honour the life and legacy of Aiko Koo. Designed with symbolic draping, sculpted tulle, and delicate finishes, the piece reflects identity, movement, and remembrance through fashion.