Armenian family cooking meets fashion in Nensi Avetisian’s mouthwatering SS22 campaign

Who: Moscow-based fashion designer Nensi Avetisian and her sister, experimental confectioner Bella Avetisian. Working together, they’ve reproduced some of Nensi’s avant-garde works in edible form, creating what they call The Tasty Series.

What: Launched as part of Nensi Avetisian’s SS22 campaign, The Tasty Series is the sisters’ first collaborative effort. Drawing inspiration from their Armenian heritage, the pair sampled patterns and textures from beloved family dishes, and transformed them into fashion-forward artworks.

The results see rosehip tea transformed into a jelly that imitates Nensi Avetisian’s SS22 mesh dress, a honey puff pastry handbag, and toffee caramel decorated with crystals of salt to resemble the geometry of Nensi’s signature structured tote.

What they say: “Some pieces from the SS22 collection were actually inspired by Armenian local food and our family recipes,” Nensi Avetisian told The Calvert Journal. She sees The Tasty Series first and foremost as a “celebration of sisterhood and love”. “I’m not really into cooking, and Bella and I try to divide our professional duties and not to interfere with each other’s work. But during holidays, we cook together with the family for fun. Bella researched our family recipes and modernised them into contemporary desserts that would imitate SS22 pieces. Her job was to merge the distinctive features of the brand, to modernise it, while saving the actual recipe with the original taste.”

What makes it different: Bella and Nensi’s work merges conscious handmade craftsmanship and technology in a bid to make people think about the clothes they wear — and break the spell of reckless consumerism. While some items from the SS22 campaign are produced with the help of 3D models, others, including the mesh dress, are 100 per cent handmade, and can take up to seven days to create.