Steven Raj Bhaskaran

Steven Raj Bhaskaran is a Canadian artist and fashion designer, born in Montreal to a Guyanese mother and Sri Lankan father. He met Hannah Rose Dalton while studying fashion design at LaSalle College in Montreal, where they trained in pattern cutting, sewing, draping and garment construction. Together they developed the collaborative project Fecal Matter, also known as Matières Fécales, combining clothing, make-up, image-making, performance, music and film.

The duo first built an audience through self-styled photographs, one-off and upcycled pieces, and objects such as their silicone “skin heels”. Their work later developed into a Paris-based fashion label supported by Dover Street Market Paris, with a runway debut at Paris Fashion Week in March 2025. Following that debut, Matières Fécales developed seasonal collections and dressed performers and actors for major public appearances. Bhaskaran’s work is inseparable from Dalton’s: they design, construct and present the project as a shared practice.

Bhaskaran and Dalton use dress, make-up and altered bodily forms to test how beauty, gender and acceptable appearance are socially defined. Their repeated imagery includes shaved heads, painted skin, prosthetics, severe corsetry and digitally or physically extended limbs. They have described transformation as a means of becoming more fully themselves, while the project’s post-human figures make alienation, body modification and self-invention visible rather than treating them as private concerns.

The practice moves between technical garment making and deliberately unstable surfaces. Training in pattern cutting, draping and sewing supports hand-made and upcycled pieces, while silicone, prosthetic effects and illusionistic styling blur clothing with skin. Later runway collections retained the provocation but introduced more developed tailoring, eveningwear and historical glamour. The work also carries an ethical critique of fashion’s waste and exclusions, expressed through reuse, inclusive casting and a preference for individual expression over conventional luxury codes.