Hermaphrodite: Sewing Dysphoria into Transformation
Fresh off winning ModaPortugal 2021 and emerging as a finalist at the 38th Hyères Festival, Tiago Bessa doesn’t enter fashion with fantasy. He arrives with something personal to say. Bessa’s graduate collection Hermaphrodité is not a spectacle but is raw pain rendered in silk, autobiography disguised as couture.
It is his lived reality of navigating gender dysphoria every day. Raised not on plastic toys but on pins and pattern paper — with a seamstress for a grandmother and a pattern maker for a mother. Bessa learned to trace silhouettes before they could spell them.
That lineage is not just technique. It is inheritance, present in every stitch. A quiet identity passed hand to hand. These garments do not ask for understanding. They embody it.
In Hermaphrodité, orchids bloom into ambiguous genitalia, surgery scars become couture seams, and Bessa dares to show the vagina not as taboo, not as fetish, but as beauty.
Faces disappear beneath veils, not to hide but to let the body speak uninterrupted. A slur once thrown at him now stands proudly as a runway title. Not reclaimed in anger, but reclaimed in truth.
We do not just talk about fabric. We talk about the era Tiago is designing inside. A collapsing timeline that both of us agree is not an ending but an ascension.
We laugh about TikTok being a portal, but Tiago does not deny it. A strange digital realm where identity, inspiration and memory all blend into one.
Bessa has even pulled screenshots from Grindr into his moodboards, Not for shock value, but as evidence that the internet’s most chaotic corners often hold the clearest reflections of human nature.
When asked which tarot card defines him, Bessa chooses The Tower. Not for destruction but for clarity in collapse. For Bessa, there is no theatrical rebellion. Only truth, cut on bias and stitched clean. Like the timeline we are living in now.
On Identity & Beginnings
Who’s Tiago Bessa — soul deep? Where did you grow up and how did that shape you?
BESSA: That’s a banger to start with. Let’s say… I don’t know if I know who I am. Soul deep, you know what I mean? I’m sort of having an identity crisis, quarter life crisis. But I’ll tell you where I grew up — maybe it will provide some insight. I grew up in Guimarães, which is a small town. I think it’s a mix of suburbs and a bit of rural, you know. But I grew up mostly in my mother and my grandmother’s atelier. My grandmother is a seamstress, and my mother is a pattern maker, and I grew up in that environment for, years.
On Upbringing & Craft
You titled the collection Hermaphrodite—a word used against you. Is this collection more about reclaiming that insult or exposing the wound it left?
I think it’s a bit of both, honestly. The word wasn’t used against me directly at first—nobody was calling me “hermaphrodite.” But people were constantly asking, “Are you a boy?” That questioning became much more aggressive later in life. When I was 18, 19, I started growing my hair out, and that’s when they started using that word against me. “What do you have between your legs?” All this aggression, these micro-aggressions, whatever you want to call it. So yes, I want to expose the wound it left. But it’s also about taking the power back. You don’t get to have power over this word when it comes to me anymore.
On Covering & Dysphoria
On Moodboards & Imagery
Inside the process
I wanted it to feel like a progression from what I had done before in fashion school. Back then, I was very literal — latex molds, vaginas, all of it. Very on-the-nose. With this collection, I still wanted that sexual anatomy reference, but translated into something beautiful, not just grotesque. Although, in a way, it still is a little grotesque — just softened.
On Recognition & Future
For me, there’s a direct parallel between surgery and sewing. Both involve needles, both involve cutting and reconstructing flesh or fabric. That’s why I left a lot of the stitches visible — contrasting threads, exposed seams. Normally you’d cover that with the main fabric, but I didn’t want to hide it. I thought, No — this is beautiful too.
Wearing Hermaphrodite
Who would Tiago Bessa dress?
On the World Right Now
I think it can do both at the same time. Maybe I’m a bit self-centered, but when I look at my collection, it’s definitely partly escapism. You’re creating otherworldly things, and a lot of it is focused on beauty. But at the same time, there’s a heavier message underneath — it reflects certain behaviors in society that should not still be happening. So to me, great fashion does both.
Fashion as Alchemy
What fuels a Designer’s Imagination?
BESSA: Honestly, I’ve had Grindr messages in my moodboards before — and I think that’s beautiful in a way. I don’t have them right here, but I can tell you what they were about. There was this guy who messaged me out of the blue — I don’t know him, he doesn’t know me — and he said, “You should cut your hair and go get a gym membership.” And I was like, respectfully, no, I won’t do that.
Photos and Videos Courtesy of Tiago Bessa
Interviewer and Writer: Kimberly Mortensen