Sartorial Identity

I never thought I would wear my striped business shirt outside of the office or my boyfriend’s bedroom until I saw Stella Jean’s SS 2014 collection. Then I realised nothing is impossible in fashion and yet to start your own pattern mixing and matching can take some time. It looks one way on the catwalk and totally different on the street.

Playing with patterns needs some:

As for me, for a long time I’ve been living in the zone of black: white and black, black and black, black and denim. I remember my boldest statement at the age of 14 – green jeans from East Germany which my father brought me from one of his businesstrips and a black t-shirt with a pair of white sneakers.
Then I went to university and I got into colour blocking. My first job made me change my wardrobe again – I dived into stripes and pencil skirts, dots and pussybow blouses and black pumps. With freelancing I felt more comfortable in creamy whites and soft nudes.

The thing is at that time I just thought of style as a fait accompli, a done deal. You search and find a definition of your style and you stay within its boundaries, watching the world passing by until it is time to break the rules, your own rules. This is when you realise that there will always be a silver lining in the way you dress but your life is dynamic and evolving and it doesn’t let you stay confined within the same old boundaries of your old closet. Human beings, well may be women (men hate change), need change and we need to challenge ourselves and evolve and be different. With age we discover more about ourselves and with this we need to change our wardrobes too. With the help of fashion we travel in our minds all the time, we transform and experiment, reaching for new horizons.

That’s when it gets interesting: The more we know about ourselves, the bolder we become in our sartorial choices and we start experimenting, looking for more: mixing fabrics, then vintage and modern, high street and luxury, couture with street style.

Today the most interesting sartorial discovery for me is the mix and match of different cultural languages in fashion and two of the finest examples of such a fashion bravery: Kazu Huggler, the Swiss-Japanese designer who uses ancient printmaking, Japanese aesthetics and traditional philosophies to create modern European clothing and Stella Jean, whose “Wax and Stripes Philosophy” reflects and evokes her métissage and Creole heritage, blending old continent cultures with the verve of the new continent. Soon more about her…