By Jessica Ye (Jessica Yap)
Fashion has never stopped chasing the idea of a goddess. Usually she appears draped in silk, cast in marble, or walking down a runway in some interpretation of ancient myth.
Dutch designer Emma van Engelen approaches the fantasy from a slightly different direction. In her world, the goddess emerges from a 3D printer.
Her label, Bhumi, has quickly become one of the more intriguing young names operating between fashion, art and technology. Celebrities such as Julia Fox and Nicola Coughlan have already stepped into her sculptural designs, but what makes the brand compelling is not simply the technology behind it. It is the way van Engelen uses that technology to return to something fashion has always revolved around: the body.
With Divine Garden, Bhumi’s latest collection, van Engelen turns to Aphrodite. Not as a distant mythological reference, but as something embodied and present.
“I’ve always been really drawn to classical art, especially ancient sculptures and works like The Birth of Venus,” she tells me. “When I started developing the collection, I noticed I was gravitating towards these folds in fabric that feel almost frozen in time.”
Those frozen folds became the starting point. Rather than replicating sculpture literally, van Engelen translated the language of marble drapery into digitally sculpted forms. Pleats ripple across surfaces, petals unfold across bags and garments, and curves echo the quiet sensuality of classical statuary. The result feels less like costume and more like interpretation — mythology filtered through contemporary tools.
3D printing often gets framed as something futuristic within fashion. Van Engelen doesn’t see it that way.
“For me, 3D printing is really just a tool,” she says. “It simply allows me to create things I wouldn’t be able to otherwise.”
That distinction matters. Many designers working with digital fabrication lean toward sleek, hyper-futuristic aesthetics. Bhumi moves in the opposite direction. Its shapes feel organic, even romantic; sculptural, but never sterile.
“I’m constantly exploring how to make the work feel more human and more organic,” van Engelen explains. “My background in textiles and working with the body plays a big role in that.”
It shows. Even though the pieces are built through precise digital modelling, they carry a softness that mirrors the curves of the body they are designed for.
The Venus bag in champagne from Bhumi’s Divine Garden collection | Images: Bhumi
If there is a philosophy running through Bhumi, it is that garments and bodies exist in conversation with one another.
“In high fashion, there’s often this idea of the body as a blank canvas,” van Engelen says. “I don’t really see it that way.”
Her designs embrace the body rather than disguise it. Curves shape the garment instead of being hidden by it, and silhouettes respond to the person wearing them.
“The body is beautiful and adds so much to a garment,” she says. “Even something very simple already takes on shape depending on the body wearing it.”
One of the more interesting developments in Divine Garden is how the collection expands the Bhumi universe beyond garments.
Two sculptural bags, Aphrodite and Venus, feel less like accessories and more like miniature artworks. Produced through 3D printing using PLA, their pleated surfaces resemble frozen fabric or blooming petals.
But van Engelen doesn’t think about them as standalone statement pieces.
“For me, everything in a collection needs to exist as part of the same world,” she says. “It all builds on each other.”
In fact, the bags became the visual starting point. Their textures and structures informed the rest of the collection, including Bhumi’s newest venture into footwear.
Designing shoes introduced an entirely different set of challenges.
“A shoe has to be functional,” van Engelen says with a laugh. “You still need a proper structure — the right tilt, support for the foot.”
Unlike bags or garments, heels must obey physics. Materials must offer flexibility, stability and comfort. But once those boundaries were understood, the designer found room to experiment within them.
“Now I actually feel quite free creatively,” she says. “I can finally make the shoes I’ve always wanted to make.”
The result is Bhumi’s first pair of 3D-printed high heels; sculptural in appearance, but designed to be worn.
To bring the world of Divine Garden to life, van Engelen cast Joann van den Herik and Jazz Khalifa for the campaign, photographed by Chiara Steemans.
“They’re very confident in themselves,” she says. “They’re completely comfortable in their bodies, and you could really feel that on set.”
The imagery captures the atmosphere she envisioned: satin drapery, soft light and a sense of dreamlike sensuality.
“I wanted it to feel like a dream of spring,” she explains. “Sensual, but not sexual. Dreamy, but still tangible.”
Bhumi began almost accidentally. After graduating, van Engelen continued experimenting with accessories and digital fabrication simply because she wasn’t ready to stop exploring. What started as curiosity gradually grew into a label with a clear visual identity.
“It wasn’t necessarily the intention from the start,” she says. “But I always knew I wanted to build something.”
Today the brand occupies a space where fashion, sculpture and technology quietly intersect.
Looking ahead, van Engelen is particularly interested in where 3D printing materials might evolve, especially more environmentally conscious options such as PLA.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m not just a designer,” she says. “But also an entrepreneur, or even a bit like an inventor.”
In an industry that often moves quickly from trend to trend, that curiosity may be Bhumi’s greatest strength. Because while Divine Garden draws from ancient mythology, its real subject is something very contemporary: what happens when technology, craft and the human body begin speaking the same language.
And if Aphrodite were to step into the present day, there’s a good chance she would be wearing something printed rather than sewn.
