The Impossible is Possible: How a fledgling designer, Elena Denisova, turned into the fashion ambassador of the future

ByElena

A few years ago, Elena Denisova the founder of the Helen Stracta project, literally blew up the Russian fashion industry, making a fashion revolution with her approach to choosing fabrics for collections. Her focus on eco-fashion, working with high-tech materials, recycling clothes, and combining different textures made her famous in professional circles. Today Helen Stracta actively develops the international fashion market, and Elena Denisova launches in the USA a collaboration with a famous American rapper JT Money. As a creative designer and designer of new textures for her brand, Elena Denisova will develop new textures and author’s prints based on the words and phrases from JT Money songs. For the recent graduate of the British School of Design, this collaborative project acknowledges her talent, skill, and creative solutions in working with different materials. We tell how her way to the top of the fashion world began and what can be achieved by showing persistence, out-of-the-box thinking, and determination.

They say that a lot of things are established in our childhood. Elena Denisova was born into a creative family, many generations of which were associated with crafts. Her grandfather and great-grandfather were wood carvers, her father made amazing jewelry from ordinary metal, and her mother worked in the weaving industry. It was from her that Elena inherited her love for natural materials and different textures. Elena has also loved to draw since childhood. She thought up smart dresses for herself, her mother, and sister and embodied her fantasies on paper. True, the path to the profession of a designer turned out somewhat convoluted. First, there was artistic gymnastics, then journalism, work on the radio, and owning a PR agency. At some point, it was realized that the accumulated knowledge I want to apply in the development of their project. The choice fell on what I had liked since childhood, which absorbed and brought pleasure – fabrics. 

The first step towards the profession was enrollment in the British Higher School of Design, where the direction for future development was chosen – recycled materials and structural fabrics. Then it will be reflected in the name of her brand, in which the English word structure (structure, texture, texture) was combined with her name. That’s how the Helen Stracta brand appeared. But first came to her graduation collection to be presented at Mersedes-Benz Fashion Week Russia. 

Her virtuoso work with textures, unusual approach to fabric textures, deep knowledge of the subject, and high level of the young designer’s developments attracted the attention of professionals in the fashion world. After the show, Elena Denisova’s name became known to the wide public, and she herself started to get invitations from various textile factories both in Russia and abroad to give a lecture on recycling, features of different materials, modern possibilities, and innovations to save the environment. Thus a new trend was created – a unique eco-textile direction in which her brand Helen Stracta is now actively developing. It produces basic collections of women’s clothing – the basis of an everyday closet – from technological and durable materials. Such clothes perfectly fit any shape, with proper care for at least ten years, do not lose their shape and attractive appearance, and therefore support the idea of rational consumption. There is no need to iron them, which is incredibly relevant at today’s pace of life. Helen Stracta’s limited collection, made from an exclusive Japanese fabric and washi paper, has anti-microbial properties: it neutralizes the smell of sweat and is extremely popular with hypersensitive people, who react strongly to stressful situations. 

In her collections, the sustainable fashion designer Elena Denisova, introduces a new trend, a unique eco-textile direction, and shows what prospects modern textile technologies open for designers. Today it is possible to create stylish, creative things and care for the environment. In fact, the designer shows us a collective image of the future fashion direction. Stylish, eco-friendly, high-quality clothing using recycled materials is a new trend actively supported by today’s buyers.

0

Elena Denisova is a sustainable fashion designer and the Helen Stracta project founder. She was one of the first in Russia to fully concentrate on creating designer collections exclusively from non-standard, complex, technological fabrics. Her diploma collection at the British Higher School of Art and Design revolutionized the fashion industry and interested the public in her unorthodox approach to fabric selection and combining textures in the basic models of women's closets. Creating her clothing collection Elena Denisova experiments with different textures and fabrics and studies and applies new technologies in textile production. Elena is called a fashion industry ambassador due to the fact that she successfully integrates the fruits of scientific and technological progress into the modern fashion industry. She creates stylish and quality garments with the care that nature does not suffer from the adverse effects of production.