Marina Fedorova’s column for Hia: Love beyond gravity and within

May has always been the season of promises. White, light fabrics, open skies, and the quiet anticipation of transformation. The moment when love seeks form through ceremonies, gestures, and, inevitably, through dress.

Somehow it makes me think about dreamlike art language of Marc Chagall. Love, wonder and marriage inspired him through all his life. For Chagall marriage is not a structure, not even a ritual, but a shift in reality.

In his paintings, lovers do not stand side by side. They float. They bend. They dissolve into color and sky. In works like The Birthday or Over the Town, gravity loses its authority, and with it, the rules that define the physical world. In Chagall’s universe, the bride becomes something else entirely. She ascends. Her body is no longer confined by the architecture of the room or the logic of perspective. She exists in a suspended state, between earth and sky, memory and dream.

Contemporary bridal fashion seems to intuitively return to this idea. Layers of translucent tulle, weightless silks, floating veils that blur the boundary between body and atmosphere, designers today are not simply dressing the bride, they are dematerializing her. The silhouette becomes fluid, almost unstable, as if the body itself is in the process of becoming something else.

If we follow Chagall’s vision, the bride is not simply a woman in white: she is a figure in transition. A body entering another dimension. A presence suspended between reality and dream. A veil becomes a cloud. And love? Love is the force that lifts her.

Contemporary artists continue to explore the topic of the bridal transformation, expand and reimagine the bridal form.

In the work of Kiki Smith, the bride is no longer an image of perfection, but a state of transformation. Her quiet, life-sized figures rendered in wax, bronze, or delicate textiles stand in stillness, often veiled or dressed in white. Yet this whiteness does not signify purity in the traditional sense. It becomes a thin boundary, a membrane between inner and outer worlds.

In contrast to the dreamlike levitation of Marc Chagall, where love lifts the figure into the sky, Smith turns inward. Her bride does not float. She becomes. A presence at the threshold is quiet, vulnerable, and profoundly real.

MARINA FEDOROVA