Dior sent models down the runway wearing amorphous silhouettes that felt almost alien. Rounded exoskeletons. Hollowed-out shapes. Bodies turned into living vessels. But behind the collection’s strange proportions was something far more meaningful.

Jonathan Anderson’s highly praised couture debut pulled heavily from the work of Kenyan-born British ceramist Magdalene Odundo. An artist who has been wrestling with filling the void, history, and the body for decades. Long before these shapes appeared on a Paris runway, they existed in clay.

Now 75, Odundo has built a career studying artistic traditions from ancient civilizations, including Egyptian, Aztec, Zulu, and Kenyan cultures. Her vessels carry that history inside them. They feel ancient and modern at the same time. Sculpted by her hands, yet almost impossible in shape. Anderson didn’t just reference her work aesthetically; he translated her understanding of structure directly into couture.

As Odundo explained in an interview with ARTnews.

“When I make my pieces, I’m very conscious of them being structured to withstand a space that is empty around it. Then you have this shape defined by nothingness. You create a form and a void.”

That philosophy is visible throughout the collection. The garments weren’t built around the body in a traditional sense. They were made to create a space around it instead. Much like Odundo’s ceramics, the silhouettes relied on tension between presence and emptiness, structure and softness. The result felt less like fashion design and more like a wearable Sculpture.

Odundo might have hit the mainstream with her 2022 appearance in Hayward Gallery’s Strange Clay exhibition, her influence stretches back decades. Her work has appeared in institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution. Within the art world, she has long been regarded as one of the most important sculptors the U.K. has produced.

For Odundo, clay is a lot more than just dirt. She describes working with it as a way to connect the eyes, the soul, the brain, and the hands. It sounds more ritual than just a mere creation process. That same energy carried into Anderson’s couture debut. Before the runway, before the applause, before the headlines, there was Magdalene Odundo’s vessels.