The mood and the aesthetic that best define my brand is a Modern Art Museum. Any and every Modern Art Museum.
I was born and raised in a communist country. I have been longing not to be in a uniform all my childhood and my early teenage years. I started making clothes because I wanted to be dressed like myself, not like everybody else. The aesthetics of those years, the minimal, the restrained, the industrial, the dry, the emptiness, still haunt me. For a long time I rejected them, I fought them, I denied them by being colorful, and full, and rich, and loud. But after all these were consumed, after everything settled, I realized those things from my past shaped me, and I let myself discover and explore the beauty in all of them. I discovered how, when well balanced, minimal can be amazingly powerful without being boring but also without being loud. I had two moments of epiphany. One was when I visited Bocconi in Milan and the second when I saw Pompidou in Paris. They made me feel safe and at home and it took me a bit of time to realize why that was. They felt like my communist Bucharest, but more orderly and more clean, and more intentional.
My brand does not speak about communism or post communism. My brand is speaking about our era, which is postindustrial. My brand is speaking about reshaping and reinterpreting the past, without denying it.
For years, my mantra has been 'Life is a funny place'. I think my brand stands for more than that now, but I also think that this is at the core of it. It grew subtler with years, but there is a sense of irony in everything I do, a sense of disruption, of not taking things (life) too seriously, that perspires from the clothes I am making but also from the way I present the showroom, the atelier, even myself.
There is also a playfulness about it, from the scratch, from my process, all the way to the showing of the product. There is a hidden little girl in the back head of every powerful woman. There is a Carla Sozzani playing with her ponytail while managing an empire. I've seen it so many times. I would almost say that the new saying, as the empowerment of women is happening right in front of our eyes, has become " there is a girl behind every powerful woman" instead of 'there is a woman behind every powerful man'.
And there is also the ludic part, that makes a flirt out of the most serious and apparently covered woman. I appreciate and encourage women to seduce with their brain. It is a femininity that is not about the body and the skin, but it's not against them either. Like there is no shame in having a body, but there is no pride either. Seduction is intellectual. It is through ideas that one opens and becomes available. The body only accessorizes the idea.
The structure comes from a genuine love for mathematics, geometry and space. Tailoring takes a lot of math, and my process, which is investigative design, takes a way more than the classical tailoring. My process is: what happens if I cut, what happens if I fold, what happens if I add, what happens if I subtract, what happens if I multiply? And what happens is that I am obtaining new volumes and new lines that at first look disorderly and I need to adjust and readjust the other lines to put everything in a new order. It's building, it's volumetric, it's layered, it has edges, it has limited surfaces, and it has textures. It considers gravity, wind, and water. In the end, the building (that is my product) must be not only beautiful, but also comfortable and useful.