Michaela Stark (b. 1994) is an Australian artist and couturier based in London. Her practice directly confronts the rigid cultural constructs of beauty and femininity. She uses corsetry and lingerie to sculpt the body and accentuate traits society asks us to hide, like belly fat, uneven or sagging breasts, even the vulva, reframing "shameful" traits into visceral sites of beauty and empowerment. Her multi-disciplinary work spans self portraits, live performance and artefact. 

 

After studying fashion design in Queensland, Australia, Michaela relocated to Europe, where she worked as a seamstress for French and British fashion houses as well as a tailor and costume designer for Beyoncé. During this time, she privately studied historical corsetry and couture, which laid the groundwork for her transition into visual art. 

 

Operating from the belief that art has the power to disrupt foundations directly from their core, Michaela’s initial focus was on subverting the structural rules of corsetry to celebrate and radicalise the raw human form. 

 

Her primary medium is her own body. Over two years of solitary R&D, while living in Paris, she developed her signature corsetry on herself. Documenting the process on video, she played with how extreme she could make her silhouette while keeping to its soft nature. This intimate documentation eventually became some of her earliest self portraits, and part of her first major solo body of work, Second Skin (2020). Even today, Stark’s self-portraits are often extracted from moving image, with the corsetry framed alongside as an artefact, broken from the tight lacing and stained with remnants from her body. 

 

In 2024, Stark was invited to perform at the Tate Britain, closing the Sargent and Fashion exhibition. For the duration of three hours, she remained in a wooden box, tightlaced, and wrapped in tulle, suffocating, as audiences drifted in and out, some remaining the entire performance as an act of solidarity. Later that year, she followed with another performance, titled Suspended, with Nick Knight at SHOWstudio. This time, she was suspended in the air for 3 hours, and dropped violently over and over again onto a butcher's block. Her sounds of pain were initially performative, but at the end they were very real. 

 

In editorial and imagemaking, Michaela has collaborated with Nick Knight, Tim Walker, Sølve Sundsbø, Charlotte Rutherford, Zhong Lin, Carlijn Jacobs and Paul Kooiker. She fluidly shifts between artist, muse, creative director, and stylist, using the visual language of fashion to criticise itself from within; whether styling Sam Smith for Perfect Magazine or herself for the cover of Vogue, photographed by Lea Colombo, with an inside spread showcasing girls naked and scissoring. In image, Stark plays with notions of hyperfemininity and beauty, contrasted with an almost punk-like campiness and unapologetic nudity, mixing her body-morphing corsetry with high fashion samples, styled on plus-size bodies, creating very serious work that doesn’t take the “rules” of fashion seriously at all. 

 

Stark’s artwork has been acquired into the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2026) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (2026), alongside a commission for The Barbican (2025). She has pioneered real-world institutional change - most notably partnering with Victoria’s Secret to reinvent the ‘angel’ to include trans and plus-sized women, and working with The Met on their inclusion of diverse mannequins.

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