Dreamlike Baroque at Rigaerstrasse
In the shadowed backyard of Berlin’s legendary Antje Oeklesund — a now-closed but iconic venue — located on Rigaerstrasse in Friedrichshain, a vision of theatrical fantasy unfolded — equal parts glamour and poetry. Shot by the extraordinary Daria Marchik, this editorial transforms rough urban decay into a gilded stage, where costume and character blend in a dreamlike tableau.
Dreamlike Baroque in the Lens of Daria Marchik
Daria Marchik is a visual artist and photographer known for her immersive, surreal, and often burlesque-infused imagery. Her work pulls from myth, fantasy, and the absurd, using photography as a tool for storytelling and transformation. Drawing on her background in performance art and fashion, Marchik creates visual worlds where characters exist in liminal, opulent, and uncanny realms. Her artistic lens invites both the performer and the viewer into a heightened state of presence.
Dreamlike Baroque… Ritual and Ornament
The garments featured in this editorial are the creations of Tata Christiane, known for her visionary approach to slow fashion and avant-garde costume design. Each outfit is talismanic — dramatic silhouettes adorned with feathers, vintage brocade, baroque pearls, and hand-crocheted details. Like ceremonial relics from an imaginary court, the pieces evoke surrealist costume traditions, balancing the sacred and the absurd.
Many of the fabrics used were sourced from vintage markets in Berlin and Marseille, revealing Tata Christiane’s signature fusion of upcycled materials, handmade techniques, and storytelling through texture. Each garment is a wearable sculpture rooted in the values of slow fashion: intentional creation, sustainability, and expressive individuality.
Dreamlike Baroque in the Berlin Setting
The location — a crumbling, ivy-clad courtyard in Friedrichshain — holds its own history. Antje Oeklesund was more than a club: it was a cultural refuge, a cathedral of Berlin’s underground scene and experimental art community. To shoot there was to align with a spirit of invention and defiance. With rubble as our stage and the Berlin sky as our spotlight, the editorial pays tribute to the city’s raw elegance and unpolished grandeur.
Dreamlike Baroque… The Burlesque Spirit
Burlesque is more than performance — it’s a state of play, exaggeration, and subversion. Burlesque art blurs boundaries between costume and persona, humor and critique. Marchik’s direction invites models to inhabit archetypes: clowns, queens, jesters, and cosmic mystics. Their costumes, oversized and layered, echo the tradition of the sacred clown or Heyoka, figures from Lakota culture known for their reversals, contradictions, and spiritual insight.
This duality — sacred and silly, elaborate and decayed — lies at the core of the editorial’s energy.
Dreamlike Baroque… A love letter
This collaboration between Tata Christiane and Daria Marchik is a love letter to theatre, to the transformative power of clothes, and to the beauty of making do and making magic. Shot in one of Berlin’s most beloved creative enclaves, the editorial captures a fleeting moment of costumed joy, baroque chaos, and deeply human expression.
This editorial not only captures a theatrical moment in time but also offers a poetic reflection on the nature of identity and transformation. In the crumbling textures of the Rigaerstrasse courtyard, the line between fantasy and reality begins to blur. The pieces by Tata Christiane act as portals — each one a relic of forgotten rituals, reinvented for a modern mythology. The combination of rich vintage textiles, hand-crocheted flourishes, and dramatic feathered headdresses evokes a kind of ceremonial rebirth.
Dreamlike Baroque… art of slowness
Wearing these garments, the models transcend their everyday selves, stepping into the roles of divine jesters, alchemical queens, or dreamlike spirits. The collaboration with Daria Marchik, whose photography often explores the surreal and the burlesque, creates a visual dialogue that echoes the performative roots of fashion. These images remind us that to dress is to invent — to transform the body and express inner worlds through outer forms.
In a time when fashion often feels rushed and disposable, this editorial celebrates the art of slowness, of handcraft, and of clothing as living art. It asks: What does it mean to wear a story? And what kind of character are you brave enough to become?
