Social media & value

In our modern and hyper-connected society, life revolves around social media. While it is nice to be in touch with your audience, it is impossible not to notice the vain by-product of this virtual life: images artificially created and obsessively shared. Yes, too much even for those of us that work in fashion!

Perhaps, you might think, social media worked well to boost self-confidence, instilling the idea that everyone can be super beautiful. We all have an amazing life. People need approval.
But if we dig deeper, we see the void generated, all the meaning has been swiped away. You mainly find empty boxes. Nice, but empty. And a certain horror rises in knowing that the percentage of suicides among teenagers has gone up due to social media.

Social media and fashion

Whatever they say, all this exaggerated overexposure didn’t bring anything positive. Not even in fashion. The expectation of fake models looking like plastic dolls together with poor language created a devastating environment.
The strategy to run a successful account consists of buying followers to attract the attention of a large audience and letting the algorithm fly. In other words, you end up talking to yourself in the mirror.
That is the game you have to play if you want to be successful unless — you need something more than a facade.

For people like us, who believe that buying books is way better than buying followers, the discomfort gets real. You don’t really want to interact with fake accounts, do you?

People who have no idea what they’re talking about, who are not able to distinguish a fast fashion brand from a high quality one, are not our point of reference. We do not consider such a person a leader, no matter how many followers they have.

It is possible to be on social media having a different approach, setting up a healthier environment based on quality and real connections, and being clear in your mind that you are playing a different game.

If you are looking for meaning, for something that matters, this is the challenge. Bring back valuable content. Bring back value. Share ideas, not plastic faces.

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Fashion is culture

With the word fashion, we mean the appearance and behaviour of a social community according to a particular taste of the moment. It refers to all the style and life elements that identify a society during a specific era.

Fashion is just another way to scan our society and culture. Another lens through which we can investigate human behaviour.

We can use clothes to hide aspects of our personality or, instead, to show and express our identity. As an overall concept, we can use clothes to analyze different cultures.

Fashion, creativity and finance

Fashion is the result of a creative process that talks about our culture. The reason it became mistreated and demeaned as a vain or silly field, lies in the system itself and some external factors.
Since finance took over the industry, during the 80s and 90s, the creative process has been forcibly accelerated, pushed to an extremely fast-paced model. Very little space was left for creativity.

Later on, when the internet and social media entered the scene, the creative side of fashion became completely distorted.
Fashion has undergone such strong pressure that valuable designers, like Martin Margiela, one of the greatest innovators and game-changers, decided to leave. Too much pressure, a continuous request for something new, too many products to put out in a short time. And then also, an obsessive hunger for information, in the form of silly poses and clownesque outfits.

Rather than a place for creativity, fashion became all about budgets, money and clowns. Pure business without a soul. Tangible examples are the rise of fast fashion and fashion bloggers.

But all that fast-paced overproduction, overconsumption, massive show-off was just a bubble, a system that couldn’t sustain itself in the long run. In fact, during the pandemic, it exploded.

Now that the world is re-awakening, we need to bring a new level of consciousness that puts creativity and ethical work at the heart. Slow fashion and smaller-scale production are the basis on which we can build sustainable models.

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Researching the new

Fashion research for a niche audience

Researching the new, exploring alternative concepts in fashion design has always been our passion, a kind of innate attitude or a real fixation.

Fashion design: niche vs mass market

In terms of fashion design, what is considered new by a niche audience is not what is new for the masses.
New means something original, singular. Something unusual. Probably or at least possibly, never seen before.

For a niche audience, new refers to what designers, or at least the really creative ones, pioneered first, expressing their vision and sense of style in a way no one has done before.
For the masses, new means what brands have taken from the few creatives, repurposing it under their name.
We can’t count the times some agents proposed to us collections we already had the season before in our boutique, just with a different label.
If you are part of that niche, that re-proposed soup is not for you. You respect the original ideas, you need creativity because you understand its value.
Unless some brands are filtering existing concepts in a new, creative way – but that doesn’t happen frequently. Copy & paste is the easy way out.

Researching the new in fashion

The concept of new in the fashion industry doesn’t exist anymore. It was pretty clear before the pandemic, it’s both frustrating and discouraging now that we are in the middle of it.

Some brands that were modern 30 years ago are still the ones we would wear now. Perhaps they already did anything and everything. So many others seem just part of an old era, outdated, they lost meaning.

While we see collections without identity, lacking idiosyncrasy, still copying & pasting from others. Grasping the occasion to reset and restart with new ideas would be a smart move.

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Women & society’s standards

A point on women & society’s standards is always necessary considering the current discussions and comments we hear. Indeed, we find it difficult to identify with women presented in the media. But also, with women presented by women themselves!

“I make clothes for a woman who is not swayed by what her husband thinks”

Rei Kawakubo

This powerful Rei Kawakubo quote, a thought we completely embrace and promote, opens up a window on society’s standards, personal growth, self-awareness, and perhaps new feminism.

Women, fashion and expectations

The clothes we wear are the expression of our personality, this is undeniable.
If we analyse the type of clothes that easily reach a large audience, we could portray a clear image of a woman stuck in the Fifties. A woman who must have a hold on men, and most of all, who must make it crystal clear, totally visible. Therefore, this statement translates into second-skin dresses, wide necklines, and super short hemlines.

In fact, this is what society expects from women, what women are educated to, by centuries of patriarchal brainwashing. And, eventually, it seems this is what women want, too, well adapted to a man-shaped society.
Indeed, just replace grace with rudeness, and we jump into our modern times.

There’s always the same submissiveness, asking for permission to buy something or buying an item only upon the husband’s approval.

Centuries of evolution from Virginia Woolf, passing through feminism and all a woman can aspire is being an accessory of a man.

On the contrary, we embrace a new sensibility away from the dominant models. Femininity free from conventions and stereotypes. Assertive, not aggressive. Self-aware, or at least opening the eyes, and beginning the process of personal growth.

Her style would be different.
We are different.
Ready to express a new vision of who we are.

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Redefine the lexicon

How can fashion evolve if the lexicon is always the same?
Pre-collections. Still? For real? Selling campaigns, seasons, gender categories, budgets, and, above all, discounts and sales. Real or fake, who cares.
The only intention is to push people to buy whatever product, keeping the business exactly as it was before the pandemic.

Can’t you see how all that is disconnected from the new reality?
All those words lost their meaning because we are in a different place now, an unknown territory, where those concepts do not apply anymore.

We expected something more. We envisioned brave designers or brands coming up with new ideas, guiding us to innovate an outdated system. But other than a lot of greenwashing, nothing has happened. Or worse, everyone’s hoping to go back to normal. Completely forgetting that normal was the problem.

So we take an active posture. We decide what is good and what is not for us and our audience. We don’t believe in a supermarket model. Preserving the value of creativity, we want to decide the quantities and quality we need to buy, based on the real needs of our community, not only to grow large companies’ pockets.
We must understand that good design and quality do not have an expiry date. We do not believe anymore in discounts as a drive to boost sales.
Sales are just another element of the status quo, a short term illusion of joy.

We believe in conscious buying, so we are educating ourselves and our community to buy less but better.

Redefining the lexicon is the first step and expression of a change in the fashion system.

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