creativity

Masculine & Feminine

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.

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The wake-up call

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.

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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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