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

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

This ‘open’ collection – which is not attached to a time or a place and is enlarged whenever a good idea comes to mind – contains collectible items: some of them borrowed from men’s wardrobe and given a different role to play in a feminine context, and others which are statement pieces that never go out of date simply because they are not made with our mind set on fashion, but with our mind set on beauty. They are functional and versatile and chic at all times, no matter the time or the age because they are timeless.

This collection testifies to AWE’s disposition to play and drama. We used this artistic tool – le trompe l’oeil – to create illusions, to dilute reality, to play games and to put it on a small show and most importantly to enjoy it while doing it.

The self is different from its projection both inwardly and particularly outwardly. This collection is therefore a dramatic portrayal of multiple feminine identities inhabiting one and the same woman. The AWE woman is queen, diva, boho chic singer, innocent girl, femme fatale, beautiful ordinary girl, movie star, artist and all within the time of one day or one life. We are who we think we are, we are who the world thinks we are, we are who we hope to become 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 we are. And we need the proper outfit for all these ‘we’.

First there was the word, the word used to put order into the chaos. AWE is our choice of word and our attempt to tell a short story in our small world of fashion. And we do it the way we please: in a baroque, modernist, minimalist, Art Nouveau, colourful and last, last but not least, funny way. That is in an AWEsome style: elegant and ludic.

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 times of human flying to space for leisure, it is fashion as a ludic exercise in one of the darkest contemporary times humankind had to experience, it is the pleasure of placing the outer in harmony with a most desired inner and of painting the grey reality into the vivid colours of one’s soul. It is a collection of outfits meant to 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 all the time. Because you might not afford it or perhaps you do 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 full stop of any good-looking outfit and the imaginative tools 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

Flowers in their arms, flowers in their hearts, flower women need their flower bags. They need them to carry around their flower souls, their flower thoughts and sometimes to hide their flower grief. These are unique, statement bags, handsewn, carefully and entirely worked in the patchwork technique. Meant for the flower woman in full bloom.

There where the sea paints all dreams and all feelings of all people in all the colours known to man, where the water is the bluest and the clearest, where the sand is the softest to touch, where the sunset is ablaze like a full-grown bougainvillea, there where life tricks you into believing 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 one of a kind patchworks, collages, items of clothing and jewellery meant to take us back to the seashores we once saw and we fell in love with.