A KALTBLUT exclusive. Photography by Kylie Shaieb. Designer, Creative Director, and Prop Making by Arie Urrutic. Makeup and Prosthetics by Sarah Tweedy. The models are Stefanie Murza and Ibrahim Williams. Arie Urrutic is a sustainable punk fashion designer based in New York. She studied fashion in Florence, Italy, for some time before moving to the city to pursue her career. Her practice blurs costume, set design, and sculpture, often working with recycled materials and handmade textures. She’s styled for musicians and worked on films and music videos, but this series feels especially personal.
The series is made up of four scenes: The Birth of Venus, The Dollhouse, and two separate Alien girl fantasies. Each is its own world, but together they trace the edges between glamour, fantasy, and the subconscious. The concept behind this photo series began as a kind of dream. Arie has aphantasia, which means she cannot form images in her mind when she thinks. Her imagination is a blank screen. Her dreams, in contrast, are cinematic and vivid, incredibly immersive, and strange enough to feel real. She often wakes up convinced she has lived them. So, in a way, this project is about translating that dream logic into tangible form. She started thinking about how much our environment shapes our dreams, how what surrounds us seeps in, reconfiguring itself into strange symbols at night. She imagined a version of herself living in the 1950s, a housewife bound to a manicured home, her world defined by pastel appliances and expectations. She wondered, what would she dream of? What escapes would her subconscious build when her waking world was so confined? Maybe she’d dream herself as a goddess, or a doll that breaks free from her dollhouse, or an alien girl far from Earth. Each fantasy is a rebellion against the limits of her reality.
The first scene, Birth of Venus, reimagines the myth through a postwar Hollywood lens, a hyper-glamorous mermaid goddess washed ashore inside a massive paper seashell. The shell itself was over five feet tall, made from chicken wire and layers of papier-mache she built by hand in her backyard. It took a month, mostly because the weather kept undoing her work. There’s something poetic about that: the ocean fighting back against its own image. She created everything for that scene: the pearl headdress, the skirt, the jewellery, except the breast prosthetics and gills, which were by the makeup artist, Sarah. It’s decadent, camp, and painstakingly fragile, like a dream you can hold for a second before it dissolves.
In The Dollhouse, the second scene, she imagined a 1950s housewife dreaming herself free of her walls. She built a surreal set where the furniture of a perfect suburban home: chairs, vanity, lamp, sits scattered along the beach, like the remains of a washed-up illusion. The model wears a paper dress, a fragile cage of domesticity against the open horizon. For her, this piece is about escape: what it means to break out of the house, out of the frame, out of the expected.
The final two scenes shift into outer space, or maybe inward, into the subconscious again. Two alien girls, one purple, one green, posed like pulp sci-fi lovers from a midcentury paperback cover. One has a matching green alien boyfriend, holding her like they just stepped out of a Vonnegut novel. These images are directly inspired by the Technicolour absurdity of 1950s science fiction. Those fantastical covers and imagined futures that people escaped into after the war. Arie always loves that era’s mix of optimism and fear, its yearning for something beyond human.
That is what connects all four scenes: the tension between confinement and transcendence. Between the shell and the sea, the house and the horizon, the body and the dream. Maybe this whole series is a way of visualising what she can’t picture, an act of sustainable imagination, of building her own visions by hand.
Text by Arie Urrutic
Photography by Kylie Shaieb / www.kylieshaieb.comwww.kylieshaieb.com / Instagram: @kashclub4111
Designer, Creative Director, and Prop Making by Arie Urrutic / Instagram: @arieurrutic
Makeup and Prosthetics by Sarah Tweedy / Instagram: @makeupbysarahgt
Models are Stefanie Murza, signed at E1 models/ Instagram: @stefmurza
Ibrahim Williams signed at Major Models NY and Umodelsnyc / Instagram: @ibrahimbwilliams
Set Assistant by Cassie Castaneda / Instagram: @caspasta
Retouching by Samuel Harris / Instagram: @goosesamuel
Brands used are: Arie Urrutic, Doc Martins, Neon Blanc
