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osiery and lingerie brand Wolford is turning underwear into art — by challenging some of the world’s top young female contemporary artists to let their imaginations run wild with its fabrics. The new programme of commissions began at the recent Helmut Newton retrospective at Amsterdam’s FOAM gallery, which Wolford sponsored in tribute to the photographer’s acclaimed advertising shoots for the company.

At the launch, Wolford unveiled a sculpture by South Africa-born artist Sayuri Chetti, who recently graduated from the renowned Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.

Titled “Alice Swirls”, Chetti’s piece is an enigmatic constellation of amoebic forms crafted from the finely shimmering black yarns and materials that Wolford manufactures for its tights. Drifting darkly in the heights of a double-volume gallery, the sculpture resembles a postmillennial Alexander Calder going through a Goth phase.

The piece is inspired by the frequent disorientation of Chetti’s nomadic childhood and adulthood: the daughter of peripatetic parents, she has lived in many countries, including South Africa, the Netherlands, Sweden and Canada. Repeatedly faced with new languages she could not understand, she had no choice but to look at written texts as purely visual experiences, signifying only the meaning she