It was when fashion designer Pia Interlandi was preparing her beloved grandfather for his funeral, complete in his best suit and leather shoes, that she realised her calling was in death wear. “Doing up his leather shoes...I was just like ‘where is he going to be walking?’ Really. He doesn’t need shoes,” the quietly-spoken, black-clad 26-year-old said. The experience helped prompt Interlandi to create her “shroud” clothing, hemp and silk garments designed to wrap the body and head, which she hopes can provide personalised and sympathetic coverings for the dead.
“People think that when I say I am a death wear designer I make fancy suits and people go ‘Oh, I want to be buried in a gold suit’. But that’s not actually the type of design that I do,” she said. “It’s about what are the considerations and constraints in designing a garment that is for the ground. The environmental considerations are huge — that we don’t want to be polluting the earth with plastics — but there is a psychological protection that we, as the living burying the dead, need. And that’s covering the body but also making sure the garment is beautiful and matches the person that is getting buried.”
Interlandi says she took a couple of years to find her feet in fashion, a career path she chose after brief work experience in occupational therapy introduced her to different kinds of moulding fabrics, such as the plastics used to cover the skin of burns victims.
She made her high-school formal dress out of this plastic, an unusual step similar to her decision several years later as a design student at Melbourne’s RMIT University to use animal organs in her work.