Tramp in Disguise was launched by designer Sini Moilanen in 2010. But Moilanen didn’t always want to be in fashion. “I thought before that I wanted to be a doctor,” she said at the Felicities Presents event held in Somerset House. Saving lives had nothing to do with the collection Moilanen showed for Autumn/Winter since her garments are inspired by the dead. “For this collection it’s been about Mexico,” she said, “It started with the Day of the Dead. It started with Aztec prints.”

The Day of the Dead has been a flamboyant festival for the departed since the Aztec times. Filtered through the imaginings of a Finnish-born Royal College of Art graduate, a degree of theatricality still surrounded this sacred Mexican holiday. Sini Moilanen’s dynamic silhouettes cut a tall and sleek figure, aggrandized by goddess-like draping and high slits. Bright blocks of colour broke prints becomingly around the waist. The rest of the garments, decorated with lace-like patterns, nodded to the elaborate but morbid designs of Mexican festival costume. Textures were light and half-there, they had about them an ethereal sheen associated with the supernatural, the dead and the divine.

Written by Marina Kolobova

Photography by Atsushi Meguro

Images provided by Sini Moilanen

Hair and make-up by Rhea Le Riche

Model: Natalie Leni's Modes