ELINA HEILANEN
SCHOOL
INSTAGRAM PROFILE
instagrama@elinaheilanen
ABOUT eLINA :
Elina Heilanen is a fashion and textile designer from Helsinki, Finland, and a soon-to-be MA graduate from Aalto University. Her practice combines a deep sensitivity to color, surface, and materiality with a strong inclination toward artistic research and storytelling. For Heilanen, design begins not from a sketch of a garment, but from an encounter with material — its texture, weight, and tactile potential. This process-oriented approach allows experimentation and coincidence to guide her, making the journey as important as the outcome.
Her MA graduate collection, May Peace Find Me on Both Sides of Sleep, is rooted in her personal experience of narcolepsy. The project explores the liminal space between wakefulness and sleep, investigating phenomena such as sleepwalking, paralysis, and the unease provoked by daytime rest. Rather than viewing these states as interruptions, Heilanen reframes them as fertile grounds for design — moments where vulnerability and rhythm take new shapes.
The collection reimagines bedding — duvets, pillowcases, bedsheets — into garments with sculptural forms and layered structures. Materials serve as both narrative and technique: hand-drawn motifs are transferred onto textiles through slow, analogue processes carried out in darkness, with the final image revealed only when light returns. This method mirrors the fragmented logic of parasomnias, where clarity emerges from disorientation. Some of these prints evolve into felted woven fabrics, leather engravings, and other richly textured surfaces, each echoing the central theme of what happens in moments we cannot fully control.
Through this work, Heilanen offers a poetic meditation on rest, rhythm, and interruption. Her collection embraces imperfection, coincidence, and intuition as design tools, transforming them into a visual language that is both deeply personal and universally resonant. In doing so, she asserts fashion as a space for vulnerability and strength alike, where memory and material can coexist in layered, sensorial narratives.
For Heilanen, design is storytelling through fabric — an act of making the intangible tangible, where the liminal becomes wearable and the unseen is given form.
