One thing about your work that I noticed is that the intersection of art in fashion, and your work is distinguishable. Could you tell me about that?
Most of my references, even though I look at fashion, and I go to fashion libraries, and I have a fashion background, because I ended up working in fashion. I am a textile designer, that was what I studied at St. Martin's in London. So I think that's in that's why it's so evident in my work that it comes from contemporary art background because for three years, or even when I was studying, I ended up working then Peter Pilotto, which is a brand that now doesn't exist anymore, but at Marques, Almeida, and that's how I started being introduced. And I've always liked fashion and enjoyed it. For years, while I was studying, it was never clear that I would end up being a fashion designer. So I've always been very interested in art. I would hang out with artist friends, and I would look for all the openings and everything. So, it just started growing more and more, but even when I went to university, I thought I was going to study fine art. I think that becomes quite evident in my work, I guess, even though now I started, I have had the brand for two years. So, I started adapting myself to the body as well, which is something that in the beginning, wasn't a concern to me. And kind of, the whole industry makes me not think like the sales point of view and everything makes me then start to consider, you know, how it fits on the body. But when I think about it, I think it's quite flat. When I start working, as always started quite flat, I can even kind of show you. And then I go into the body after months and months of researching and material. So yeah, so that's why and I've been working as well. Like this year, I kind of went back to my background, and I had an invitation to be part of a textile exhibition in a gallery in Lisbon. So that was when I realized that hey, I want to be back into this and this is what I really enjoy.So yeah, so the word crosses both fields. So, you went to school for textile design, then started working for those brands.
How did the idea of starting your own brand come about from the dream to reality of making your own brand?
I guess in my case, because it was quite spontaneous. It's not that I had the dream, it was not a thoughtful decision in a way. So basically, I was working in Paris, I worked for Balmain for a year and a half, two years. But I did present my final via collection here in Lisbon at Lisbon Fashion Week, I was in London for like, six years, I didn't know how the scene was in Lisbon. And I got this invite after I finished my VA for someone to view my work. So, they invited me to have a small presentation, and to create garments. And I thought, why not? It's quite challenging, let's give it a try. So I did it, but I was not confident at all because, I’m in Portugal, people dress up in a very conservative way. And so I presented my collection, it was like, probably my favorite tool ever, I would say, and, and yeah, and it turns out that there was Suzy Menkes there, and there was a lot of press at that time, because there was an ongoing fashion sustainability conference happening in Lisbon. So, all of a sudden, I got some attention. I started getting a lot of requests from stylists and people asking me to buy. But at that point, I felt I wasn’t ready to start my own brand. I just graduated so I went to Paris, and I started working as a designer at Balmain but then it started getting quite tricky to manage everything. So after like, a year or so I started realizing I was getting tired, I was working overnight on my own collections, I was trying to deal with all the shipments and as you know, my work is fabric focused so it takes a long time to produce and I would need a lot of machinery and I would need suppliers all the time and had to deal with everything. I had another invite from Lisbon fashion to present a collection and so after like three or four invites that I declined because I was working, I was like, “Okay, I'll give it a try and make another collection. It was a more experimental thing, I did a lot of collaborations for that collection with like friends from CSM: a jewelry designer and knit designer and this hat maker so it was more of an experiment in a way. So, from then onwards the brand started growing. I was always in Lisbon but I might go back and work for a big brand again because I really enjoy working for other people. Then it evolved and now it's been two years, the brand, and I'm happy though.
So you've touched a little bit before in other interviews about your title. You'd rather go by textile designer than fashion designer. What was the thought behind that decision?
I think it’s more of a matter of being quite honest and humble about things. In a textile forest, what you do is you explore the textile and I didn’t have any knowledge on a pattern, pattern making, pattern cutting. It’s something I learned a lot while I was at St. Martins, Peter Pilotto, and Balmain. I had to learn but I wouldn’t say it’s my focus. So, I just think it’s more fair for me to be called a textile designer and it makes my possibilities open to continue to work as an artist or as a textile artist. So, that’s how I try to keep it but, nowadays it’s quite tricky because I feel the brand a bit more and I had to focus a lot on the brand and on management and on the whole side of clothes. So, maybe I’m becoming into this fluid thing that it’s the textile fashion designer, if you can say that.
What’s the process behind making your fabrics and the certain designs that you’re doing with those fabrics?
So, it usually starts with a book, or with written words, because I find it more challenging in a way to not have like visual references and then to go from concept, a text, a poem. Like right now, for the next collection, it starts introducing that. I found N.H. Pritchard, an American poet, who wrote a visual poetry book. And it’s quite challenging to me to then start to realize the concepts and even the words onto materials. Last season, I was reading a book about difficult lovers and exploring love stories. It talked about when you’re next to someone on the train and that person touches you and you feel that weird feeling. Then from there I started thinking about exploring that. I started thinking about all the times I was next to someone, feeling the fabric, asking myself, “What kind of fabric was it? What was the color?” And obviously I have a lot of references, fashion references, artist, techniques but usually it starts with a book.
Your Trompe L’Oeil Jacquard Dress has gained a lot of popularity, what were some of the influences for this particular design?
So, Trompe L’Oeil Jacquard means “deceive the eye” in English and it’s a technique that I've actually been exploring since I was at university, not with body shapes but it’s like this idea of illusion that I explore in all my collections, like illusion is an emanation over a reality that doesn’t yet and I quite like that idea since I explore a lot of media. Say you have a knit and I want it to look like a print and I want to create that confused, illusional thought that you don’t know what it is. I’ve been exploring that since I was at university using creased fabrics and pretending it isn’t printed on and referencing Gaultier, Margiela, and Castelbajac. So, once I was at the factory where I do my jacquards, which is this technique I really liked, this new technique. They had this calendar, a porn calendar kind of. So, the jacquard translate reality, translates an image with all the pixels and we were all having lunch and I was like, “Okay let’s try this, this is quite fun,” and as a joke because it’s also nice to be next to suppliers when you do stuff like I do, it’s good to be nice to them, get to know them to understand because it’s a tricky job. I posted on my Instagram stories, and then I put my phone down and then all of a sudden I had loads of people being like, “What’s this? What’s this?” So, for the past like two years, I thought there was no context to introduce it but everyone kept asking about the dress so, I decided to work a bit more on the artwork to mix images of different bodies, even my body, distort some of the things, distort a bit of the tummy so that it doesn't look the classical woman’s body, even though it’s a slim, skinny woman’s body or a perfect body. It has this weird alien vibe to it and like an illusion with the arms that makes it not the focus is not if the body looks good or not, or if it's like our preconceived idea of a perfect body. So, then it started like that, and then we put it on our online shop and from then onwards we've been selling a lot, and it became popular.