creativity

Smells Like Marketing

Reading Time: 2 minutes

When marketing overshadows creativity: the homogenisation of fashion


Fashion smells like marketing. Not creativity – marketing.
It’s embedded into the product, making everything look the same. Brands drowning in a cloying, flat 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 (Stella McCarthney) want to ban leather; if not that they’ve always used synthetic materials to make their accessories – which is even worse. Some others (Chloé) 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 – creating 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 so-called ethics smells like marketing. Nothing more than empty claims.

You can hire marketing gurus, but new ideas and creative designs are hard to find!

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What If I Don’t Have Money?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Redefining style on a budget: exploring smart choices beyond fast fashion


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 by 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 are aware of the reality, the tough times we are experiencing all over the world. In fact, we are all in the same boat, so we must 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, perhaps requiring a little creativity.

No money, but plenty of 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, that’s 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 garments. 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 encouraging overconsumption, we can use a little creativity to update our clothes. Give them a new life and mix them in fresh ways. So you can renew your wardrobe even with a limited budget.

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

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Masculine & Feminine

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Exploring the boundaries of style and the culture behind it


Style plays around the concepts of masculine & feminine. However, the line between them isn’t always well-defined, allowing them to blend and creating more space for freedom and creativity.

Fashion & gender


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

If you were young during the ’80s and ’90s, and your favourite designer was Jean Paul Gaultier–a true creative genius–you would later realise that you had seen everything possible in fashion and life. Forget the fast-fashion era; that was a wonderful time! Creativity was at its peak, and 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 ahead of his time, with a unique attitude–definitely a genius!

We can say he was changing culture through fashion.

Masculine, feminine and gender-fluid fashion


Gaultier was the first to introduce diversity and inclusion, laying the groundwork for a gender-fluid fashion. On his catwalks, we saw everything–men wearing skirts, women in oversized suits, and a celebration of different body shapes. ‘Love yourself as you are and play with clothes’ sounded so beautiful to us.
Gaultier’s fashion has shaped our vision to a point that now, everything feels like it’s already been seen. Perhaps he took us to another planet, one made of love, acceptance and play.

Perhaps fashion evolved faster than society’s ability 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

Reading Time: < 1 minute

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, what we are doing is working toward change for the better.
But don’t underestimate small changes. Even modest changes in our lifestyle can have a significant impact.

Every choice we make, from what we wear to how we consume, contributes to this transformation. Awareness is the first step, but action is what truly drives change. Both collective effort and individual responsibility shape our future.

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

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Fashion Is Culture

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Exploring the intersection of style, identity, and society


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.

How culture and fashion have evolved


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 truly sustainable models.

Fashion is culture–reflecting the values and spirit of our times.

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