Danish designer Violise Lunn creates fantasy paper shoes and dresses

Danish designer Violise Lunn makes magic with paper tissue and glue, crafting dream dresses and fantasy shoes that seem destined for fairies. This adventure began in 1999 when the late Kirsten “Kiki” Kiser, a Danish model turned architect and gallerist, asked if Lunn could make a frock out of paper. “I thought, Well, why not?” the artist says on a call. “I made dresses, and then afterwards I thought, Okay, the dresses needed shoes, and then I created some shoes with papier-mâché.”

Lunn, the daughter of a weaver and a proponent of slow fashion, has a custom atelier in Copenhagen, where she trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts as a designer. Her studies weren’t motivated by launching a brand. “It was just learning to use your hands,” she explains. “I love the fabric. I love the creative part, the handicraft, you know, all the techniques to make something that is beautiful.”

Lunn works with paper as she would a textile, with glue substituting for stitches. In 2006 her delicate paper works were translated into porcelain by Royal Copenhagen. “Whether I design porcelain, paper sculpture, paper shoes or dresses, it is detailed, poetic, and feminine,” notes Lunn. “I wouldn’t call it simple and Scandinavian, but something more playful.” While many people ascribe a magical quality to Lunn’s work, she does not. “Fairy tales can also be very grim, can’t they?” she muses.

More delicate than Cinderella’s glass slipper, the artist’s light-as-air works might be fragile, but they have staying power because they excite, and live in, the world of imagination.

Photos: Courtesy of Violise Lunn