creativity

Production chains impasse

18 March, 2023

The urgency to make a change

Production chains have been disrupted first by the pandemic and second by the war in Ukraine. Which, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to have a short term solution.

And so, the question arises about how to reorganise the production system in a new sustainable way.

The most striking point is that the western world is set up only for consuming goods produced in countries where wages are below the standards which would allow a decent life. That is a dead-end system: corporations will never renounce that magnificent cake which secures their profits. At the same time, everyone worldwide contributes to sustaining that system by overconsuming goods.

With a complete lack of vision, most companies hope to get back to normal soon, identifying that normal with the pre-pandemic and prewar structure. But the war and the new outbreak in China added more problems, further slowing raw material supplies and destroying markets. So it just got worse. While disrupting production chains, those catastrophic events are bringing in radical changes. And maybe, even those companies who prayed for “back to normal” will understand that life will never be the same, nor will production chains.

Production chains – What are the possibilities?

Small-sized companies offering local productions are more prone to change and more adaptable to new situations. The big chains don’t have this ability to change and adapt quickly.
Artisanal should be the new normal, guided by the principle of going ahead with production only when there is a commitment to purchase. No overproduction.
Also, more focused production would give space to creativity, which is fundamental to conceiving meaningful products, goods made to last and worth buying.

Small, artisanal and creative are just some of the elements that provide a thoughtful and sustainable business model.

Of course, being creative means taking risks, so no one wants to do it because there’s no guarantee of success. But the catastrophic events we are witnessing tell us that we must change now.
In order to provide sustainable production chains, we need people leading the industries with innovative visions based on ethical principles.

Taking risks is part of the game. There’s no other way to make a change.

Smells like marketing

17 March, 2023

Fashion smells like marketing. Not creativity. Marketing.
It’s embedded into the product, making everything look the same. Brands united by a flat cloying language.

It would be interesting to understand why designers do everything except what they are supposed to do: create beautiful clothes. There must be a reason for it.

After the fashion weeks, the Gucci Love Parade in Hollywood was yet another weird event, representing the many futile proclamations navigating the sea of marketing.

Some designers want to ban leather; if not that they’ve always used synthetic materials to make their accessories (which is worse). Some others became a B-Corp but lost the beauty of their collections. Others tell us to buy vintage instead of new clothes. Maybe those proposals have to do with a sustainable lifestyle, blindly giving the benefit of the doubt. But, leave good design aside.

Designers forget the purpose of their role.
Instead of doing their job – making beautiful clothes – they suggest alternative lifestyle strategies.

Marketing and the purpose of a fashion brand

If you are a designer, you should have a vision and express it through your creativity. That is an opportunity to trace new pathways, inspiring others. But the issue is that clothes have no point anymore.
The design is not the focus of a collection, the chit-chat that surrounds them is.

Well, designers, the viable idea is to make much smaller collections. Reduce – a lot – the number of pieces and create a timeless aesthetic.

But please, put your creativity to work and make curated creations that reflect your visions.
We appreciate your lifestyle suggestions, but creativity is what we expect from you. All the other proposals have to come along with it. Otherwise, it seems like you have no ideas except marketing claims.

Wittgenstein said that “ethics and aesthetics are one.”

In the latest fashion proposals, apart from the questionable aesthetics, the supposed ethics smell like marketing. Just empty claims!

You can hire marketing gurus. But new ideas and creative designs are hard to find!

What if I don’t have money?

11 March, 2023

What if I don’t have money? This is a question we are asked frequently, from young people and those who don’t have much money to buy quality clothes but want to change their lifestyle, cutting out fast fashion. What can they do? What are the options?

This is a topic we have explored and discussed many times with our community. We know about the reality, the tough times we are experiencing all over the world. Also, we are all in the same boat, so we have to find solutions together. Uplifting the lifestyle of our community is a crucial step.

First of all, we believe it is a matter of educating ourselves to consume differently, a conscious choice on our part. And there are things we can do, which perhaps require a little creativity.

No money, but much style

When we were young, we used to transform our clothes. For instance, we used to take a pair of denim jeans and unseam the legs. Then, give them the shape of a maxi skirt with a front or back slit, and resew. Same procedure for the short skirt version.
Grandma’s white linen slip-dress worn with a belt and a nice cardi became a summer dress. Don’t forget vintage ties! They can be cool belts. Training yourself to see and wear items in a different context is just a game of fantasy and style. So, open your family closets and play!

Vintage pieces are the perfect timeless choice. Investing in some good vintage pieces should be on top of your list. We just want to clarify what we mean by vintage: clothes coming from past years or decades. When we see second-hand fast fashion clothes sold as vintage on some resell platforms, we cry. That is not vintage! Vintage has a quality that lasts for decades, not what fast-fashion can offer!

How to build a timeless wardrobe

This is our advice to avoid the look of a character who jumped out of Grease. We would suggest buying only two new quality pieces, one top – one bottom, and mix them with the vintage. In this way, your outfits will be modern and unique.
Timeless quality items will stay with you for a very long time. If you can, just add two more the following season and keep on mixing the new ones with the vintage. The ability to mix, by the way, is the fun side of fashion and the true essence of style.

So, replying to question: What if I don’t have money? Instead of eating up whatever brands make with the sole intention of making us over consume, by using a little creativity we can update our clothes. Give them a new life and mix them in a new way. We can renew our wardrobe even with a limited budget.

We are grateful for the quality of our interactions that keep the discussion alive. Thank you, community!

Masculine & Feminine

11 March, 2023

Style plays around the concepts of masculine & feminine. But sometimes the limit between one and the other is not so defined, meaning they tend to mix, which leaves more space to creativity.

Fashion & gender

When selecting items for our boutique, we’ve always kept an eye on men’s clothing. We love picking up some men’s items to mix in. We adore the duality of the masculine-feminine style. Also, limiting clothes by gender is a little too restrictive for us.

If you were young during the ’80 / ’90, and your favourite designer was Jean Paul Gaultier – a real creative genius – later on along your path, you would realise you have seen everything possible in fashion and life too. Forget the fast-fashion era, that was a wonderful time! Creativity was at its peak, that unforgettable energy created iconic moments in fashion history.
All the concepts now popular in fashion were launched by Gaultier about 40 or 50 years ago. He was living ahead of his time, had a unique attitude, definitely a genius!

We can say he was changing culture by making fashion.

Masculine, feminine and gender-fluid fashion

Gaultier has been the first to bring in diversity and inclusion, laying the groundwork for a gender-fluid fashion. On his catwalks, we saw everything, men wearing skirts, women in oversized suits, different body shapes. Love yourself as you are and play with clothes, sounded so beautiful to us.
Gaultier’s fashion has fed our vision to a point that now, everything seems already seen. Perhaps he brought us to another planet made of love, acceptance and play.
Maybe fashion evolved faster than society’s capability to adapt to the changes.

“Too much comfort is not good for creation.” One of his brilliant quotes invites us to reflect on the specific moment we are living.
Discomfort plays a role in creativity. We must remember it.

The wake-up call

11 March, 2023

Lifestyle is constantly evolving.
It’s not about hectic fashion anymore, that time is over.
We learned the lesson, so we are evolving towards a new era based on consciousness. The pandemic is our wake-up call. Pollution, climate change, social issues, racism, our behaviour of the past led us here. Now, we must think about what kind of world we want.

Fashion as a reflection of who we are must be involved in the lifestyle evolution process. It’s about understanding the core values, so, as a consequence, we search for a design that fits our new vision.
Creativity takes time to express itself, manufacturing quality items takes time. Trust takes time too.
No need to hurry, not anymore. Slow is ok. Indeed, the process of consciousness takes time.

So, after the wake-up call, change for the better is what we are doing.
But don’t underestimate small changes. Even modest changes in our lifestyle can have a significant impact.

2021 is our blank page. Reset and restart with us.

Fashion is culture

14 March, 2023

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.

Researching the new

14 March, 2023

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.