Like Scheherazade, who survived 1001 Arabian nights by telling the Sultan 1001 stories to convince him to spare her life, like the ten people in the Decameron who fled Florence to an abandoned villa from another plague and kept themselves safe and sane by telling stories, in this collection AWE tried to save the people wearing Scheherazade from the grey and the ugly of our everyday lives by patiently piecing together small scraps of fabric that would otherwise have been discarded and gone the way of all waste: into harmful pollution. By recovering all these fabrics and sewing them together piece by piece, we have invented and told a different story to help us move on. It is the story of matching colours, the story of joie de vivre, the story of responsible consumption, the story of authentic slow fashion and the story of sustainable fashion.

This collection is about memory and identity. We remember the inspiring people behind us, artistic geniuses and enormous gifts, and their work that made us dream and smile and hope and love, and we honour them by reminding others of them as best we can, and by not letting them go. It is an exercise in remembrance and gratitude in the absence of which we would not be round and we would not be what we are today.

The self is different from its projection both inwardly and particularly outwardly. This collection is therefore a dramatic portrayal of multiple female identities inhabiting one and the same woman. The AWE woman is a queen, a diva, a boho chic singer, an innocent girl, a femme fatale, a beautiful ordinary girl, a film star, an artist and all within the time of one day or one lifetime. We are who we think we are, we are who the world thinks we are, we are who we hope to be one day, we are none of the above and all of them at once, and we are who our broken mirror in a lost attic shows us we are. And we need the right outfit for all these ‘we’s’.

This is a mini-collection about the minimalism of cuts and colour blocks and the maximalism of emotions and stories; it is space-age fashion revisited in the days when people flew into space for leisure; it is fashion as a playful exercise in one of the darkest contemporary periods mankind has ever known; it is the pleasure of harmonising the outside with the most desirable inside and painting the grey reality with the vivid colours of the soul. It is a collection of outfits that will help us reach the end of our dreams, touch the rainbow and come back in style.

AWEsome jewellery is fashion jewellery. Why fashion jewellery? Because you cannot carry gold and diamonds around with you all the time. Because you might not be able to afford it, or you might not want to waste your savings on precious stones. Because fashion jewellery is cool and colourful and unpretentious, affordable and versatile. Because it is the comma and the dot of every good-looking outfit and the imaginative tool we use against reality. Because it tells our story. Because we love it. Because we follow Coco Chanel’s advice: “I only wear fake jewellery.”

This is her picture as she was: – It seems a thing to wonder on, – As though mine image in the glass – Should tarry when myself am gone. – I gaze until she seems to stir,— Until mine eyes almost aver – That now, even now, the sweet lips part – To breathe the words of the sweet heart:— And yet the earth is over her. – D.G. Rossetti

An AWEsome Pre-Raphaelite Feminine Portrait

Where the sea paints all the dreams and feelings of all the people in all the colours known to man, where the water is the bluest and clearest, where the sand is the softest to touch, where the sunset burns like a full grown bougainvillea, where life makes you believe it is the most wonderful thing there is, there lies the Mediterranean, a place painted in the most beautiful colours. This is a limited edition cruise collection created with the Mediterranean on my mind, a collection of unique patchworks, collages, clothing and jewellery designed to take us back to the seashores we once saw and fell in love with.