If the purpose of clothing is to cover, it’s ironic then that the designs of Liza Keane make their wearer more naked than before. A sullied assemblage of silk and leather, Keane’s garments are equal parts vulnerability and violence, what she describes as emotional evidence of things experienced.

Sex and nudity are core to Keane’s work, but not in fashion’s conventional sense. Rather than low-cut necklines and slinky silhouettes (though those do form part of her design repertoire), Keane’s nudity comes in the shape of a trompe l’oeil skeleton, via hand-moulded leather that emphasises each bodily crevice, and through see-through cotton that takes the appearance of bodily fluids. Keane’s nudity is anatomical. Her portrayal of sex is bloodied, tangled and tender. The women in this world are fleshed-out (literally); characters who inflict as much pain as they receive.

After first gaining attention in 2022 for her psychoanalysis-inspired MA Graduate Collection BEAST (christened into celebrity-approved status by Julia Fox), Keane’s creative universe has come to include sculpture, masks, card games, condoms, and now, film. COEVAL had the pleasure of speaking with the designer in her London Studio about her creative process as a form of self-excavation, the implied fragility of womanhood, and the ways she’s evolved since her graduate collection.

You use the words “subversive femininity” when describing your work. What sort of woman are you designing for? Are you designing for a particular kind of woman?

“That woman” is more like an avatar that slips between archetypes and characters I invent. If I’m honest, she’s always, at her core, a version of myself.

For as long as I can remember, I seemed to cross some invisible line, first in the eyes of my family, then in the eyes of men. I was “too much”, even when I went out of my way to sand down the edges. Eventually, I realised it wasn’t that I was excessive, I was just inconveniently myself and I intimidated people. Whenever I sensed that, I shrank myself smaller and smaller until, in my mid-20s, I broke. I’d hollowed myself out so completely that I became a shell of a person. I couldn’t stand my own reflection. That’s when I made BEAST.

Since then, my work has softened, shifting into something more darkly romantic rather than the solidary dominance I was exploring then. Now the woman feels more like a contradiction: she’s still a beast, but she’s also a lover.

I’m interested in how the female figure interacts with themes of psychoanalysis in your work, especially with how traditional psychoanalysis treated women, be it ideas on sexuality, the female deviant, or going as far back as Freud’s penis envy. Does this relationship play out at all in your collections?

I’m drawn to psychoanalysis because it feels like a clinical lens through which desire, fear and identity could be classified, sometimes pathologised. But not with anything explicitly female in mind. My entry point wasn’t Freud; it was Melanie Klein. I came across her concept of the Paranoid-Schizoid position, which, if I remember correctly, focuses on erotic transgression and Adam’s sacrifice. Later, Julia Kristeva’s abjection theory deepened my interest. I only arrived at Freud afterwards, and honestly, it left little impression beyond respect for laying the groundwork for an entirely new field. Jung, however, stayed with me, particularly his ideas of the collective unconscious and the shadow, which were very key for me when working on BEAST.

Ultimately, psychoanalysis interests me because it deals with the edges of the self, where boundaries blur between desire and pathology, self and other. That tension is the same one I explore in my work.

“I immediately associate fragility with sensuality. Erotic beauty often feels designed to be degraded. That’s its function. You take something pure and drag it through the mud.”

— Liza Keane

Your label feels more like a multidisciplinary world-building exercise as opposed to a traditional fashion brand with seasonal collections. When it comes to this wider story, how do you go about building each chapter from the last?

That’s a massive compliment, thank you. It’s not a neat, linear narrative. My collections are more like dramatised diary entries. They don’t begin or end in deliberate continuity. I return to ongoing obsessions, sometimes to excavate them more deeply, sometimes to see them from a new angle after straying somewhere else entirely. What ties it all together is less about theme than sensibility, a personal language I’ve been developing intuitively since I can remember. Every artist has one: a shorthand of gestures, codes and obsessions that externalises their inner particularities. For me, that language has always been rooted in tension: polarities stretched, blurred or inverted. And threaded through it all is a very specific humour; kind of dry, slightly cruel, and at times, dark.

Can you tell me about the sculpture you did in 2024, Used? What was it about?

Someone once told me they felt like they had used me. I didn't feel used until then. The word lodged in me, and it hurt in a way I couldn’t shake for almost a year, not so much the statement itself, but the weight of the context in which it came. Afterwards, I feared also that my narrative of events would be distorted or erased. Making Used was a way of recording it for myself, almost like creating emotional evidence. Each cell in the piece marked a night, a fragment of experience, and I made so many that I lost count. In the end, the sculpture stood twice my size. My monument to the weight of those memories. Through it, I was reflecting on memories of specific nights, but also on my relationships with men in general: the roles they’ve played in my life, the character I’ve become through those encounters, and the sequence of toxic shit I’ve put myself through. I don’t see myself as a victim in it, though. I know I’ve perpetuated a lot of it. If I wasn’t the one crying, then it was usually the other way around.

Earlier, you used the term “implied fragility” when talking about the female body. What does this mean in terms of your design language?

I immediately associate fragility with sensuality. Erotic beauty often feels designed to be degraded. That’s its function. You take something pure and drag it through the mud. Take lingerie, for example. Expensive lingerie is inherently fragile, even impractical for daily use: instead of covering the body, it exposes and frames nudity. Silk, lace, all materials that exist to highlight vulnerability rather than protect against it. When I introduce menswear into the collections, it becomes more of a dynamic dialogue between the two characters. Traits of one inform the other. If there’s a victim, there has to be an aggressor. I like to play with those tropes, subvert them, and weave them into the clothes.

In a recent interview, you spoke about looking for a new muse to obsess over. Did you have any success in finding it/them? What makes something or someone a muse to you?

I did find them… though not in the way I expected. You’ll see traces of it in the Fall/Winter collection in February.

A muse for me is someone who embodies the essence of what I’m already chasing in my work. They become a lead character in a film you didn’t know you were casting. Encountering someone like that is completely intoxicating. And not necessarily with the explicit goal of translating all that into a project, but I just feel drawn to them; it feels like they pull me deeper into myself. Being seen and interpreted by them feels just as important as seeing them.

These characters feel so central to your work. What does your broader creative process look like?

It’s never linear. Usually, it begins with something lived: an event, a series of experiences. From there, it unravels in looping fragments. I write. I draw. I watch films that look like the feeling I’m trying to articulate. I get drunk and listen to music on the highway on the way home. I collect objects and clothing that echo the memory. Sometimes ideas arrive in whole. I’ve had some images arrive in really vivid dreams, which I know sounds a bit cringe, but it’s true. Sometimes, they require continual development. I drape and cut things up a lot to find new shapes.

In a nutshell, I try and externalise an inner state in the attempt to make some sense out of it, to exorcise it out of my head. And sometimes, I do. BEAST was a very resolved kind of collection. It came with a sense of certainty and a set of defined beliefs and conclusions. But my work since has felt more like a continuous question mark. The characters are less sure of themselves; they exist in states of liminality, as I do.

“Psychoanalysis interests me because it deals with the edges of the self, where boundaries blur between desire and pathology, self and other. That tension is the same one I explore in my work. ”

— Liza Keane

I take it we’ll see these more ambiguous characters from you this London Fashion Week? Congratulations on being selected for the British Fashion Council’s NewGen by the way. Can we know anything about your upcoming collection? How does it interact with your existing work?

It began with the word ‘chimera’. It appeared in my head one day, before I even knew its meaning, and when I looked it up, it felt uncanny. A chimera is a Greek myth of a creature composed of disparate parts; it often symbolises illusions or impossible dreams. That captured exactly what I was feeling: violently contradicting impulses, uncertainty about what was real, a sense of chasing mirages. I was also fascinated by the literal body of a chimera, made up of parts that shouldn’t cohere.

I think Chimera brings back that idea of an unstable self. A self in flux. As a person, I softened a lot after BEAST. During that collection, I was really focused on building myself, finding out who I was and making it into a set of rules or a code. But past that, I got into a bunch of situations that tested what I thought I had become. I don’t regret any of it, but a lot of it was quite… I don’t want to say tragic, but it’s poignant to me when I think about it. These are things and people I’ll never forget. It left a stain; I didn’t leave unscathed from those experiences. When I say I’ve “softened” [since BEAST], I guess in the sense that I wasn’t like a protruding dick of ideas in the world anymore. I invited influence, and it influenced me.

Maybe this is a continuation of what you just spoke of, but as a final question, what’s a situational truth that you’ve learned recently?

I think sometimes we can be really certain of things. Maybe it’s logical what you’re saying, but allowing for doubt to make room for the other person’s perspective. I really feel like we’re all here to learn lessons. Maybe your ego’s convincing you you’re fully in the right, your echo chamber’s convincing you, and maybe that person is wrong. But they’re in your life to show you something. So, I think stepping outside yourself, empathising really, really deeply and fully, even if it’s to your disadvantage. Having the grace to do that. That’s something I’m working on.