The Irish designer Una Burke wants to explore the relationship between fashion, art and psychology, through her leather creations that seem to captivate the body.

Lady Gaga and Daphne Guinness have worn her modern ‘armours’ while one of her characteristic leather corsets ‘traps’ one of the dancers in the new Ozzy Osbourne’s video clip.

Una explains how clothes that trap you can at the same time set you free.

-Your pieces give me the essence of a modern body armour. Are we looking at a protected body or at a body forever trapped?

The use of the body is a physical representation of the state of mind after a traumatic experience. The body is not really being protected but it is being trapped in the different gestures that we associate with this event and the resulting stages of emotional aftermath and healing.

-Can you describe us the creative procedure you follow when you design? Do you have a particular ritual?

I research psychology quite a bit, in books, on the internet and in everyday life as I am a natural observer of human behaviour. I am intrigued by the way that we categorise everything into boxes so that we can relate to them on some level or another. I aim to make people question these norms and taboos and see things in a different way. For example, in my most recent collection I made one piece from black leather and metal studs. Automatically several people told me that this piece was very ‘fetish’. I decided to make this very same piece from pink leather and it received a completely different reaction from the same people.

Find the complete interview here on Ozon.

Una Burke is exclusive to 4.

Read the original blog post here on Ozon.