Portraits of Ballet Dancers in Hand-Folded Paper Dresses

The PLI.Ē Project is a photo series that shows ballet dancers around the world wearing hand-folded paper dresses. It’s a collaboration between Montreal-based photographer Melika Dez and paper artist Pauline Loctin (AKA Miss Cloudy).

Each of the costumes’ design and color combination were chosen specifically for the dancer’s body, skin tone, and the location they would be dancing in.

“We did a first version of the project in studio and a few months later, we decided to push the boundaries even further and risk shooting paper dresses outdoors,” Dez tells PetaPixel. “Paper can be a fragile material to work with and that is exactly why we decided to make the impossible, possible. No matter which element we would be confronted to, water (rain), wind, we wanted to show that we are limitless.

“We traveled around the world and took the paper tutus to Paris, Rome, New York, and Montreal, choosing iconic landmarks as backgrounds for our creations.”

All the photos were shot using natural light using a Canon 5D Mark IV and mostly Sigma Art lenses.