suite123

Masculine – Feminine

15 June, 2021

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, later on along your path, you will realize 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, unforgettable energy creating iconic moments in fashion history.
All the concepts now popular in fashion were conceived 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.

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.

Less stuff, more meaning

17 June, 2021

Passing through the storm of the pandemic, we had the feeling that many brands had lost their grip, their meaning while a few others have been able to keep consistent work, somehow surviving the impact. Not because their message is new, but because, perhaps 30 years ago, they dared to propose a different viewpoint. By the way, that is the power of innovation, not everyone gets the message immediately. It takes a while, even decades.

So many garments now seem to be part of an old world and aren’t appropriate anymore. Some others carried on their codes, values, as they are still modern, versatile and never out-of-place.
In order to adapt to a new environment and to find a meaningful way to pursue our passion for design and fashion, we have to pay attention to select the right pieces.

The new aesthetic develops around deeper concepts: timeless and comfortable silhouettes, soft textures, materials you love to feel on your skin. Fewer pieces, higher quality is what identifies a modern wardrobe.

Less stuff, more meaning is the evolved ethos #formodernhumans

The wake-up call

14 June, 2021

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. The process of consciousness takes time.

Change for the better is what we are doing.
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.

Who has a voice

22 June, 2021

One of the many problems with sustainable fashion is that those who have a voice in discussing the topic are exactly the same ones who created the toxic environment.

They set up a system based on massive overproduction to be disposed of through crazy budgets to retailers, outlets packed with discounted items, and a parallel market to reach those retailers who wanted to buy certain brands but officially could not. Therefore, all the Maisons increased the budget to retailers, knowing that they were then reselling through a parallel net, feeding that hideous system.
All the operators knew how it worked, but since they were making a lot of money, it was good. Like it was acceptable to do the worst things in the name of god-money, but now that the industry collapsed, they’ve started questioning it.

How many goods those enlightened CEOs and managers did believe people could buy?
Is the fact that they are not making money as they did enough to let us believe in their redemption?
We could invite Hannibal Lecter to the table but perhaps serving only vegetables will not be enough to change his tastes in food.

If we believe we can search for the value of sustainability among the same old faces, we are wrong.

The dark side of modern society

4 June, 2021

Scanning the dark side of fashion, we came across a document released by ASPI – Australian Strategic Policy Institute – “Uyghurs for sale”.
Uyghur is an Islamic minority from the far west region of Xinjiang. The Chinese government has facilitated Uyghur and other ethnic minority citizens’ mass transfers from Xinjiang to factories that operate in the supply chains of about 83 well-known brands.
In China, 80,000 human beings live in segregated dormitories subject to constant surveillance. Put through ideological training outside working hours.

Fast-fashion brands are made in China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam. Therefore, we naively thought it was mainly a fashion-related issue. Learning about that horrific condition, we had to change our mind, as often happens.
Going through the pages, ASPI named various global brands, not only from the fashion field but technology and automobile too, and, of course, we know them all pretty well.
The dark side of fashion, that was supposed to be the point. At least we initially believed it was a matter that identified one industry only. But, in the end, we acknowledged that there is a common thread that links all manufacturing, the whole economic system.

Although we believe it is crucial to uncover fashion issues to move towards a better society, it is clear that exploitation, environmental impact, disposable goods, and lack of inclusivity, are issues that regard our modern society in full.
Perhaps, it is not about fashion but human behaviour, the greed that characterizes and dominates our economic systems.

The truth is that society needs new slaves to flourish.
This must stop.

Sharing ideas

3 June, 2021

Ideas are powerful. Sharing our thoughts makes the energy greater.
Sharing is at the heart of our community. Believing in the possibility of inspiring each other, cross-pollinating, is the real precious benefit of our interactions. It is about being open to a growth process that enriches us, broadening our visions.
Hearing our interconnection elevates the sense of community. A group of like-minded people, focusing on specific values: inclusion, diversity, ethical work, kindness, respect.
Fashion is the door that lets us in, connects us, knowing that we don’t stop at a superficial level. We enter from that door to find a common ground, but then we dig deeper into our culture and lifestyle.
Together, we facilitate an ecosystem where we develop beauty, empathy, value. We connect, we come together to make things better.
Join our community by sharing your thoughts with us!

Social media & value

2 June, 2021

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.

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.

Fashion is culture

1 June, 2021

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 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

31 May, 2021

Researching new concepts in fashion has always been our passion, a kind of innate attitude or a real fixation.
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.
Unless they are filtering the concept in a new, creative way – but that doesn’t happen frequently. Copy & paste is the easy way out.

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.