Summary: What if the reason you feel lost in your clothes has very little to do with clothes? For Building Your Style, I’ve adapted the methodology I use with my personal styling clients into a journey you can follow on your own—starting with the person your wardrobe is supposed to represent.

If you didn’t read the first essay of this journey I encourage you to do so.

That took us to a common ground about what style really means and that we don’t need to create a personal style as if it is something that doesn’t already exist. We need to learn how to recognize it.

And in order to do that, I want to ask you to have a notebook specifically dedicated to being your companion on this journey so you can write down your reflections, insights and findings as we go.

Not only because I did this myself for my own personal journey, but also because putting things into words is actually a powerful tool for anything you are struggling with inside your head. Therapists can testify to that.

It kind of organizes your thoughts, in my honest opinion.

If you are not fond of writing, what I sometimes also do is to record myself. Just like Louis Litt from Suits with his dictaphone ( a woman has layers, okay?)

This is going to be important in order for you to navigate what’s next!

Make a folder for your voice memos on your phone, have a notebook, transcribe your voice memos… Just simply have your journey documented somehow so you can go back and edit it whenever you want and add to it, edit if you want and sharpen it.

We are beings in constant change (some more than others but changes happen anyway) and this documentation can help you understand your personal style in a more direct way.

I am sharing here some steps of the methodologies I use as a personal stylist and fashion consultant broken down into something that can be useful and impact more people in this format. By the end of the process with a client, I usually deliver a dossier with everything we talked about and did throughout the whole journey so the client can come back and read it or see it every time they need.

This step you are going to have to do it on your own, but I think it’s best to construct it little by little as we go.

Now, let’s go to work.

Let’s talk about you

So, I want you to take a moment and think about why you feel lost with your personal style or why you think you don’t have it.

Some people answered this to me in the past like:

• “I feel that everybody around me is always better dressed as i am”;

• “I felt in the past that the way i looked wasn’t important but one day i showed up at work with a suit my sister gave me and everybody noticed me for the first time in years”;

• “I think i just lost track of what it is appropriate for certain occasions and quite often panic and don’t know what to do”;

• “After my second pregnancy my body changed drastically and I didn’t recognize myself anymore in it nor even in my favorite clothes”;

• “Quite often I feel like I don’t belong to this group of people who care about clothes but in reality I also never made an effort to understand it, but now being single I kind of do and want to”;

And the list goes on and on, but the point is: Knowing the why is important. Naming the discomfort is important in order for you to put the problem at the correct place.

Apparently, all those people above had the same problem, right? Style, buuuuuut throught looking inwards you can see that they don’t! Therefore, the solution will (in this case) surpass their style but that doesn't mean that it’s going to end the same way!

As many people say it’s not, the problem can be actually your clothes! Or also, the problem can actually be your body changing. It can be that you moved cities, it can be that you are single again…

What i want you to discover beyond this is what you want from this journey and what “problems” we are trying to solve with your style. Do you want to feel empowered? Do you want to feel comfortable? Do you want to feel desired? Do you want to feel seen? All the above?

Different problem, different solution through style.

Write this all down on your notebook or talk to Norma on your dictaphone.

Another layer

A mistake I see people making all the time, including myself in the past and also all (yes, all) my clients, is that they usually buy what’s trendy, what other people consider to be pretty, what they see on pinterest, tiktok, instagram, and end up in the same place: having nothing to wear when they want to get dressed or put a little more thought in it.

Why does this happen?

Read more

Summary: I went to Prato to see the Alaïa and Balenciaga’s exhibition with their designs displayed side by side. I thought that the exhibition was all about that but then I read the catalog and turns out the similarities between the two were only the beginning of a much more interesting story about references, archives, technique and how fashion knowledge survives after the people who created it are gone.

I am excited about this one. Not only because we are going to talk about things that I really love, but because we are going to touch a main point of this publication: how fashion knowledge is constructed, preserved and passed along.

Last April I went to Museo del Tessuto in Prato with Polimoda to see the exhibition held in association with the Azzedine Alaïa Foundation in Paris called Scultori della Forma.

I was stunned once again by Azzedine’s work.

One of my favorite designers of all time is (and I think always will be) Azzedine Alaïa.

At first, I thought that I actually liked him for his designs only, but the more I dig and study about him, the more I love that man!!

Some of the reasons why we are going to cover here, but the way the exhibition was structured is very interesting! From the beginning to the end you have Alaïa’s work with Balenciaga’s next to it and vice versa.

You can actually see when a designer respects somebody else’s work. Translation: you can see Alaïa was heavily influenced and inspired by Balenciaga, but inspired is indeed the word!

He could produce a look that resembled Balenciaga’s design but in a way that the look is totally different.

This exhibition seeks to show the affinity of thought, construction, form, shape of both designers. Scultori della forma. Sculptors of form.

It shows a lot the points in common between the two in terms of defying construction with textiles over time! Which is amazing and super rich but then… I dove into the catalog!

And things changed.

The dialogue

Alaïa wasn’t simply influenced by Balenciaga and Balenciaga alone. Pretty much everybody that came after Balenciaga was impacted by his work! This is just a flat interpretation that we can all have about pretty much any designer.

What is actually particular about this exhibition is the lack of hierarchy between them.

Originally conceived in 2020, by Olivier Saillard at Fondation Azzedine Alaïa in Paris, this exhibition aimed to picture Alaïa and Balenciaga side by side as equals with the initial idea and wish of Hubert de Givenchy in doing so (soooo chic, babes).

Balenciaga and Alaïa were presented as being both sculptors, with no hierarchy between them.

The difference is that Balenciaga came first and Alaïa studied him like a master and as a studying a master he never formally met. The narrative revolves around establishing a dialog between two designers that were different in design language but produced comparable results due to the fact that the Balenciaga garments presented were owned and collected by Azzedine Alaïa.

It’s a visual materialization of a decades-long conversation between Alaïa and Balenciaga that never took place in real life except for the fact that those garments were used by Azzedine as study material.

They’ve never met.

The relationship here between the two is not a master with his apprentice but an indirect apprentice who saw the value in preserving fashion history to observe, interpret, learn and then create novelty not in a reproduction kind of way we see nowadays.

Having a reference doesn’t mean producing the same result or product, but it’s actually understanding how that reference works instead of understanding just how to make that reference.

The difference between these mindsets is gigantic!!!

Alaïa wanted to understand the logic behind the garment and its construction rather than copying the same results. It’s a mindset that makes you understand how to increase the number of solutions and skills you have in order to be possible to produce a garment, not simply replicating it to sell clothes.

That, i might say was the winning mindset that made him the amazing designer he became through the years.

The absence

In 1968, Cristóbal Balenciaga closed his maison at a moment when prêt-à-porter (ready to wear) was radically transforming fashion, cause he built his business around couture.

Azzedine Alaïa was invited to choose from some of the garments from the collection (cause it wasn’t recognized yet as an archive back then).

He selected the pieces that were presented to him (one in particular had the names of the models on it and dated to a fashion show that took place in 1955) and also promised himself to dedicate his time to all the tailoring masters who came before him so their memory was never lost.

Alaïa then became a fierce collector of fashion garments.

While the other designers in the same era were spending their money on art (I don’t blame them at all), he was spending on pieces that were constructed to perfection.

He collected pieces from Madame Grès, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga, Adrian, Chanel, Jean Dessès, Dior, Madeleine Vionnet, Jean Patou, Paul Poiret, Jacques Fath, Lanvin, Claire McCardell, Lucien Lelong while also preserving his own archive and some pieces of his contemporary peers such as Pierre Cardin, Junya Watanabe, Comme des Garçons, John Galliano, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Martin Margiela, Yves Saint Laurent, Thierry Mugler, Alexander McQueen, Yohji Yamamoto, Vivienne Westwood and Nicolas Ghesquière.

The Fondation sayss that he collected over 20,000 pieces.

The risk of all this technical knowledge disappearing made him find the purpose of preserving it.

He understood the historical value of those pieces and when he saw an assistant use the fabric of one of Balenciaga’s dresses to produce a new coat, the books say that he simply thought that she had no right to do that.

For him, it naturally seems like those pieces had not only a very strong name on them, but were also those pieces were also a testimony of time, memory, technique and knowledge.

The studies

I saw a quote today that said “You don’t learn to swim by reading about the water” and this logic applies here fits like a glove.

Alaïa studied fashion through garments.

Little by little, he built an archive in order to learn from observing the way it was constructed, inside out, cut, sewing, structure, proportion, textile, fitting but also, he understood the importance of preserving things in order to share that knowledge tool with others.

Azzedine used to receive some requests to shorten Balenciaga dresses from his clients and he started to propose making them a new garment in order for him to keep Balenciaga’s.

We are talking about a man who used to read fashion magazines and get stunned by Balenciaga’s garments.

The construction around the hips, the rotund shape of the back… Historical records state that he used to ask himself how that could stay up and still stay on a body and how the cut could produce such effects.

His eyes and thoughts made him think about how to unveil these mysteries himself!

For him, it seems like when he spotted a garment, his initial thought wasn’t “that’s beautiful” but actually “how’s it made?” Like reverse engineering.

The line of thought here is: the archive served as a transmission of technology.

A preserved garment made it possible for people to touch it, measure it, compare it, draw it, understand it in order to learn the type of knowledge that is not written in any book.

There are some types of knowledge that cannot be put into words, they are passed along in many other ways. When a professional dies, part of his knowledge dies with him and we are left with what they’ve left behind.

Those garments were part of the material trace from that professional’s knowledge turning them into primary sources of what was inside of their minds. It’s kind of a very intriguing VIP ticket to the other person’s brain.

The sculpture

If there’s one thing that they both had in common is the fact that both knew how to make clothes. Not only drawing, not only coming up with a concept, not only manage an entire atelier, but constructing, cutting, proportion, fitting.

That’s why the term couturier is so important when we talk about both.

Balenciaga in his time was considered by his peers the only one in couture who could produce an entire garment alone. This is not me saying, it’s Coco Chanel’s saying. The only couturier. The one who could actually cut, mend and sew an entire garment from start to finish. The others were designers.

And Alaïa, throughout the years studying masters, also became one.

Both dove into the goal of constructing form over textile not only treating it as decorative surface, but they didn’t do it in the same way.

Balenciaga worked with the space between the body and the clothes. He wanted to produce a gap between the body and the fabric so the body didn't have to dictate the silhouette. He used volume, architecture, air, void and distance to produce the round backs, cocoon volumes, suspended forms, silhouettes that don’t necessarily reproduce the anatomy of a human body.

When we talk about Balenciaga, we talk about the space between body and fabric and when we talk about Alaïa, we talk about making the space almost non-existent.

On the other hand, Alaïa works to bring the fabric closer to the body like a second skin. The female body is a main component in construction in order to control the form using stretch fabrics, jersey, leather cut and zippers to produce a layer close to the body and show form.

And I am just going to say something cause i see a lot of people making the wrong assumptions about this: Balenciaga didn’t want to hide the body and Azzedine didn’t want to sexualize it.

The body is not necessarily the final form.

Both were in the form-control business in different ways. Balenciaga building shape around the body and Alaïa creating it on top of it or through.

From both we can see that the shoulders are relocated with frequency, the waist is redefined, the hips are constructed, backs have volume and the proportion is manipulated.

The garment creates a new body figure.

Even if Azzedine studied sculpture before construction of garments, the sculptors statement of this exhibition is rooted on the fact that both didn’t simply cover the matter with fabric but actually manipulated the mass, the volume, the contour, the balance and the relation between empty and full.

The common ground

If you see the catalog, the clothes etc., you may also think that the common ground between them lies in the usa of the color black, the ornaments and prints, but it goes beyond that!

Black was used a lot by the two. Not in the lazy minimalist sense that we see people talk about nowadays. It’s actually a color that for some represents peace! Believe it or not. Darkness is something we can expect if there’s lightness, but in their work it’s an intentional choice cause black showcases more the silhouette, contour, volume, texture, light.

With the way they work in order to showcase form, adding colors can be distracting and the architecture can go to the background or can become a sub-story.

By using black as the main color, the sculpture becomes evident and kind of difficult to ignore.

But diving into the actual biggest point of affinity between the two designer’s work, we have the obsession with cut. With where the textile would be cut. Here millimeters and inches for more or less change the garment fit completely! It changes the tension of the fabric, the volume, movement, proportion, sagging… the cut is actually more important than all ornaments combined.

Side note that i think is interesting

Olivier Saillard, the curator, says in the catalog that when he met Alaïa, his house and professional environment was full of clothes, objects, art, books, documents, people.

He had a collection of things that existed inside of his life!

Reading this, for me, was like an embrace inside of a book. Living does things to us and some people manifest the evidence in personal collections.

The why

When I left the exhibition with the catalog book in my hands, I thought that I had already been transported to another world just for the beauty and craftsmanship I saw on those clothes.

For me, owning a piece of those or even increasing my personal collection buying more pieces of Alaïa and Balenciaga is something that I actually dream and want to do someday.

I love fashion and beauty.

But I also left with doubt cause usually exhibitions like this are a manifestation of the times we live in, from my perspective.

Quite often you get to know about some new exhibition coming out but also we don’t stop to think about and understand why this title, why now, why this point of critic or point of reaffirmation…

I asked myself: why did this particular exhibition take place in Prato in 2025/2026?

After diving even deeper after reading the book, I understood by simply touching grass with Alaïa’s purpose!

The fashion industry nowadays craves preservation of not only fashion archives worldwide but also the techniques and technicians themselves!

Ateliers in Florence that were there for centuries are closing, putting years of knowledge and craft to waste, designers report a creative crisis that’s been going on for years now and Alaïa, out of instinct, back in the day moved the needle to preserve it.

We live in times when people register a lot of knowledge without actually acquiring it! Projecting the image of being literate and smart became more important than actually being and it is a breath of fresh air to see that some people before us were mature enough to cared about leaving us with something to learn from.

I’ve learned once again that for us to be ahead we need to study behind.

If this made you learn something restack, please! It helps more than you’d think.

See you in the next issue.

With love,

Brisa

Writing today from Florence-IT.

You may also like:

• Fashion History 1 - When did clothes became an experience?

• Fashion History 2 - The dress that may never had existed

• Fashion Puzzle 1 - The year is 2026, and we are still obsessed with the 90s and 2000s

Summary: Brasil, for a Brazilian is actually written with an s instead of a z and this is precisely the country I miss the most! The one with an s. You see, when you change it to a z, the image that comes to mind is much more Rio-core than the real continental-sized country called Brasil. Food is a language but also the translation is never 100%! Boteco is not the same as a Bar and finger food is not petisco. It will never be! But this restaurant in Rome made me go back to my beloved country for a couple of hours with the flavors being spot on in every dish!

Read more

Summary: It was almost the end of 2025 when I had a lecture at Polimoda with Professor Aurora Fiorentini about a painting portraying one of the Medicis that made history not only in art history but also in fashion for many reasons! After i saw it in real life i got the urge to research it and found out that the dress on that same painting could be one of the most expensive ones ever made. In this issue i wrote about one of the dresses associated with the most luxurious craftsmanship that live in the Italian collective imagination and the mystery behind it’s own existence.

Long before photography existed, we all know that human beings developed many ways to try to freeze an image in time, but to understand the evolution of garments, i discovered that we also need to understand when humans started to portray in art the very fabric people were wearing or the way they wanted that fabric to be.

But there’s something about paintings that will always be striking to me and this one wasn’t different.

Ah, important to say that i did this visit with an audio guide cause i knew already I was going to see a lot of paintings that I only saw before in books, so I wanted to see what they had to say about those! I didn’t expect to see this painting that day but I am glad I did. The information below about it wasn’t in the audio guide, it all came together after I saw it and did my research in books and many articles I found online!

This is the Portrait of Eleonora di Toledo with her son Giovanni from the painter Agnolo Bronzino

If you get the chance to see it in real life at the Uffizi in Florence take a moment to let it sink in first. From afar, you can see all the shades Bronzino made throughout the whole painting especially in the fabric and brocade, which actually makes you already understand how complex this painting actually is in terms of technique.

But the magic really happens when you come a bit closer. It’s like the painting competes with real matter.

A bit of the background story - Who is this lady?

Eleonora di Toledo (1522-1562) was the daughter of Pedro Álvarez de Toledo, Spanish Viceroy of Naples (yeah, if you didn’t know, Naples and Sicily are two regions of Italy that had a lot of Spanish heritage and influence) and she got married to Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1539 (to bring both Governments closer).

When she came to Florence, she brought not only political connections, but also some of the Spanish taste, protocol, references and culture. She also became fundamental in many political maneuvers, being left in charge of the state many times during her husband’s absences (the diva wasn’t only decor at that court i might say).

This painting is actually a political statement combined with an image of the State. But why? Because she was portrayed in a way to show power, motherhood, continuity of the bloodline and political stability.

She got portrayed with her son, Giovanni de’ Medici, second son of Eleonora and Cosimo, born in 1543 and his presence in this painting is interpreted by the researchers and specialists at Uffizi as the representation of the Medici’s bloodline continuity.

The Duchess contributed a lot to the significant prestige increase of the Duchy of Toscany since she was very involved in arts and culture as a way to promote the craftsmanship of the region and its power. You see, when she got there after marrying Cosimo, she was only 17 years old, speaking Spanish on a very traditional Italian soil, with a textile industry craving to be revitalized and valued.

Eleonora, over time, built an army of painters, goldsmiths, weavers that were paid just as much as the ones who worked at the most prestigious courts at that time. She was one of many advocates responsible for bringing prosperity to medieval shops, prestige and money.

About the dress

Some sources say that in an attempt to revitalize the Florentine textile industry and show what it was capable of, the textile was a satin Florentine brocade, broccato riccio (some sources called it also broccato riccio sopra riccio because of the three-dimensional effect that the golden threads have on the fabric but i went with the Uffizi official one) also used in liturgical garments.

The Florentine brocade was one of the most complex, expensive and luxurious textile techniques in the Renascence period combining threads of gold, silver and velvet.

It is believed and speculated that the fabric used was the one called teletta d’argento, a base made of white dense woven satin silk made of silver to give the fabric more of a luminous effect (due to the fact that nobody could ever make a textile analysis on this garment, nobody knows actually if it was produced like this but i wanted you to have the mental picture about how luxurious this fabric was).

The Riccio (crimped) technique (gold rings) was used to create a three-dimensional golden texture where golden threads were passed over with special needles and pulled on a hand loom in a way that created little textured rings all over the fabric capturing light. The black details were made with silk velvet and hand cut in different parts of the yarn creating a contrasting shade through the light and texture of the other details.

It’s a textile produced to project complexity, richness, wealth, texture, depth not through color but through light! You can see that with the light-colored background, black arabesques, gray and silver areas, golden motifs…

Some sources attribute the design of the fabric to Antonio Bachiacca (embroiderer of the Medici court) and you can see that in the center you have the picture of a pomegranate, a symbol of fertility, resurrection and prosperity (Uffizi reads this primarily through Christian symbolism, but other interpretations i found speculate that the pomegranate was widely used in paintings of this period with this particular meaning, others that this is also a symbol of her Spanish roots since is the Isabella I of Castile emblem, and others that this is a borrowed Arab-Persian kind of embellishment).

The bodice and the sleeves showing parts of the shirt underneath closed with golden buttons are parts that show the Spanish influence at this garment cause this style was very worn on the 16th century.

The mystery behind all this

So, if everything i wrote so far wasn’t enough for you, i warn you that i got addicted to digging deeper into this since i kept finding out details about this painting and this dress that were simply fascinating and we are about to get some more!

I’ll explain: Eleonora’s wardrobe was reconstructed in detail, archived, documented and all and then some. BUT. The dress in this painting doesn’t correspond to any registered piece!

There was this legend that she was buried in it, but when historians finally opened her grave, they found a garment that later on was restored and studied and it wasn’t a match for the dress from the painting.

You can actually see it at the Museum of Costume and Fashion at Palazzo Pitti in Florence. I’ve been there but my photos weren’t that great from this part… I’m sorry for that but thanks to the internet, I found an amazing woman who post her own pics.

So, we don’t actually know if the dress existed at all. Isn’t that amazing? I mean, we are talking about one of the most extraordinary garments of the Renaissance period and we don’t even know if it existed at all! Are we talking about representation of a garment or documentation of a garment here? I guess we just have to live with this mystery and this mental puzzle! I am sure i will!

Let’s go even deeper

The thing that struck me the most about this painting wasn’t just the visuals, its complexity, the meaning behind each element or the fact that it may not even existed! It was actually the fact that nothing needed to be there to just project the image of wealth! Don’t get me wrong, i’ve loved learning everything about it, buuuuut the purpose of this painting and the choices made along the way result in this image is communicating something with intention and that, Dearest Gentle Reader, is INSANELY AWESOME!

I really know the power of intension towards dressing, but artistry like this puts everything into flat perspective (no figure of speech here, cause it’s a flat surface, it’s a painting!).

The misunderstanding that using fashion as a statement is something of our times

Now let’s bring this to another level! A lot is said nowadays about wearing clothes as a statement, as a political tool, as a kind of expression but we tend to forget that this is actually something rooted in human behavior for centuries!

It was the custom back then that these paintings were sent to allies of the court in Europe. The paintings were pieces of propaganda, a way to portray not only the person depicted in it but also many aspects of the region, the values, the culture, the power, the relevance. It was a way to market the State and its relevant figures.

Portraits could also play a role in marriage negotiations. Some paintings were sent to courts all over Europe, for example, so woman and men (or teenagers cause back then they were very young usually at this stage of life) could actually select who they were going to marry.

Also, those paintings were spread so alliances could be reinforced by showing everyone in court visually the bloodline and bonds formed by the marriage.

But for the Medici family it had something else to add to this equation: the family had to legitimate itself as a member of royalty since they weren’t a part of the old European dynasties (Cosimo became a Duke in 1537, so the noble status attached to the family was recent, after centuries of work from his family to gain political ascension). Eleonora’s portrait reinforces the wealth and sovereignty of the Medici Family.

The paintings were also a way to be present politically without having to be physically present and quite often were displayed on the palace Galleries as a reminder of the political alliances and commitments between states.

By posing for a painting like this, Eleonora projects the image of:

• A secure bloodline, cause her second son is with her in the picture;

• Tuscany being a wealthy state, cause she is wearing pearls and gemstones all over her with gold everywhere, wearing a garment made of silver, gold, silk, silk velvet made with the hardest and most beautiful techniques there were at that time;

• Wearing the best there is, serving as propaganda for the local craftsmanship impacting not only fashion, but also the local shops’ revenue, promoting the local labor force;

• A strong union between a traditional bloodline and the Medici and its military power, cause Eleonora was the daughter of the Viceroy of Naples, remember? She was also linked to the Charles V’s Habsburg imperial system. The way the dress was cut (at least from what it appears on the painting) is very aligned with the Spanish etiquette but the materials used in most of it (the details at the collar are attributed to a Spanish seamstress) are all Florentine.

So, what we call today “fashion statement” is actually a more contemporary view of a pattern of human behavior! We are using our clothes as communication tools since antiquity! The same logic can be applied nowadays to the red carpets! The logic feels familiar: Before, the court used to portray in paintings people in political power and now we portray in photos people with cultural power.

Some interesting facts to know also

• The blue background is the lapis lazuli blue. This was the most expensive pigment available at that time made from lapis lazuli itself and traditionally used in Italian art for the Virgin’s cloak and a symbol of the family’s deep devotion to Mary and Christianity;

• Eleonora had in her palace a weaving atelier that was conducted by a woman named Madonna Francesca di Donato (according to some sources, she used to sleep next to her looms so people couldn’t copy or steal her work. Is that true, i guess we’ll never know! But, the most important fact about this is that it was rare to see a woman working in this type of position in those times, so…);

• Historians sought for the records of the purchases made for this dress and also extensively cataloged her wardrobe but they couldn't find any trace of bills or orders for this particular garment;

• By that time, there were laws in Florence forbidding the bourgeoisie from wearing all sorts of things, but as Duchess, Eleonora was above that law. By wearing what she used to wear, she not only became a reference but also consolidated the Medici’s transition from bourgeoisie to legitimate monarchs (the so-called sumptuary laws… I am going to write about this as well in another essay cause it is super interesting as well).

I am not sure whether the dress existed or not matters that much. And I cannot believe that I am writing this, but I had to make peace with the fact that after all this research and the encounter with this painting, I just can’t say anymore that a piece of clothing has to exist to serve it’s communication purpose. I am not even sure if Bronzino painted that while Eleonora was posing! I just think that regardless of that, that dress speaks without saying a word! Isn’t it what clothes were always about?

And I was fortunate enough to see that in real life five centuries later.

See you in the next issue.

With love,

Brisa

Writing today from Rome-IT.

You may also like:

• Fashion History 1 - When did clothes became an experience?

• Fashion Puzzle 1 - The year is 2026, and we are still obsessed with the 90s and 2000s

Summary: So, in order to understand fashion as a phenomenon and also an industry, i caught myself thinking that i need to understand better the basics and that drove me to study again how things began in a sense. On that note, fashion history is taught in a way that presents to you what was done without telling you why. Here we are going to figure out why clothes are actually an experience.

I’ve always wondered why and when things got to be the way they are in fashion. Was it fashion itself a result from a succession of attempts to decrease the distance between clothes as objects to clothes as experiences? Was it that way around at the begining or was it not? In trying to discover that, i began to search for the best answer.

You see, humans are animals that rely heavily on vision to trigger their own imagination and when it comes to clothing, well, the mind can travel to a different image of what they are supposed to look like on your body.

Among the earliest documented European methods that tried to make us have this mental image in how a piece of clothing would look on a human body were later on known by names such as “Model Dolls”, “Fashion Dolls”, “Pandora”. Those dolls were used as a way to show garments from at least the 18th century onward because it was easier to transport the dolls around Europe and showcase the designs.

Those dolls were some sort of a tool that helped dressmakers display their creations in a static form so their clients could see the shape, the fabric, the quality of the sewing and many other details.

It was in the 19th century with an insight from Charles Frederick Worth that the “live models” were used in the presentation of garments (for lack of a better term! It’s also important to say that this was a practice already used in the arts).

Think about it. On a static form, the client cannot see:

• The fit - because the garment is not placed on an actual body;

• The movement - well, this one is kind of self-explanatory;

• The link between body and clothes - if that garment is supposed to be the layer between my body and the external environment, how am i supposed to understand if it’s not inhabited?;

• The way that piece of clothing transforms into something else when somebody is inside of it - Clothes are the vessel of humans in a sense and a person inside of that can turn those clothes into something else in feeling, expression, emotion…

It’s almost as if he was thinking about what his clients were not feeling or seeing with the static mannequins that led him to ask Marie Augustine Vernet, during the early 1850s, to wear his designs so his customers could see how his work “behaved” in real life.

You see, how can you sell a garment that is supposed to fit a human body on a wooden mannequin only? He solved a problem in order to allow the customer to experience the garment in a way to be more interested in it and purchase.

This decision impacted the industry overtime as a whole into making modelling become a profession years later.

Later on, the number of models increased and couturiers started to host in private salons presentations of their designs on live models to selected customers, another seed for what later turned out to be the previews for their collections.

Due to the fact that the business was growing and also Charles Frederick Worth started to have a clientele outside of France, he started to organize these presentations four times a year according to the seasons, but he wasn’t the only one! He was the one who consolidated this type of practice which later contributed to the development of the twice-yearly calendar that we adopt nowadays.

So, the living model changed the nature of what was being presented. Instead of taking the humanity out of the garment, in order to relate to it, the human being had to be invited back in! On a living body, that garment acquired movement, character and life.

Clients were no longer simply looking at fabric and construction, they were being invited in.

And just like that, we can understand that the dolls made fashion travel at first, the body made them move and the recurring presentations started to organize garments throughout time.

Fashion became what it is the moment the industry understood that selling garments meant actually selling a vision of the life that could happen inside it and that’s a concept that the luxury market lives on till this day.

See you in the next issue.

With love,

Brisa

Writing today from Rome-IT.

Summary: This is not a sponsored post, this is not a review newsletter, this is not a newsletter about hair per se. This is the story of what happened when someone who had trusted the same hairstylist for eight years moved to another country and had to start over. We talk a bit about identity, trust and unexpectedly finding a place that felt like home in Florence.

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At some point between 2015 and 2016, images of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy started circulating more widely on Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Photos of her walking around New York, dressed in an extremely silent way.

And I say silent because calling her style simple, minimalist, etc., as we’ve been seeing in countless posts here and there, is actually one of the clearest signs that we’re looking at fashion through a very narrow lens.

A woman who used to wear Calvin Klein (at a time when the designer was redefining the aesthetic of the 90s) and Yohji Yamamoto — designers that require a more attentive eye to truly understand the nuances of their work — is not someone who dresses in simplicity, but in intention.

But that’s not our conversation today. We’ll come back to that later, okay?

The point is, bringing this back in 2015 felt like just another aesthetic reference being revived. But looking at it now, it was one of the first signs that something was shifting.

Because this doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens within a broader context.

The book The Burnout Society, by Byung-Chul Han, was originally published in 2010. But like many ideas that affect collective behavior, it doesn’t explode the moment it appears.

It reverberates.

And around 2015 — with new translations and wider circulation — the idea that we are living through a generalized exhaustion, not physical but mental, emotional, existential, starts to become more present.

The structure of society shifts, just as described and grounded in the book. Salaries stop keeping up with the cost of living, working hours intensify, and the dream that was sold as accessible to all of us starts to reveal its flaws. The result isn’t just economic. It’s psychological.

And fashion, as a system deeply connected to human behavior, begins to reflect that.

If you look at what was happening up until 2015–2016, it becomes clear that we were coming from a peak of excess: Instagram at its height, the Kardashian aesthetic, logomania, hyper-visibility. Everything was too much.

Too much stimulation.

Too much consumption.

Too much performance.

And it’s exactly at that point that behavior begins to shift.

People start gravitating toward figures whose appearance feels more anonymous, more restrained, more silent. Less performative. That’s when Carolyn Bessette Kennedy comes back. Not as a trend, but as a counter-movement. She represents the exact opposite of that excess.

In 2019, the pandemic accelerates this shift. It intensifies what was already happening. The search for comfort, for example, was already there — but it becomes consolidated. Looser silhouettes, like baggy pants, enter everyday life, even carrying references from 90s and 2000s subcultures like hip hop, rap, and street dance.

The body asks for rest, and clothing responds.

Just as it seemed like we were coming out of this moment, new layers of tension begin to appear.

• The war in Ukraine in 2021.

• The war in Gaza in 2023.

• Trade tariffs imposed by Donald Trump, further shifting the center of luxury consumption toward Asia and the Middle East.

• Changes in migration policies in the United States.

• And more recently, new conflicts in the Middle East.

For the first time in history, all of this is experienced in real time, on a global scale, and right at our fingertips. We are living through all of this while being hyperconnected.

It’s interesting to think that the term hyperconnectivity emerged in the 90s and 2000s to describe a state of intense connection (hyper — from Greek, meaning excess; connectere — from Latin, meaning to link or bind), but over time, it stops describing systems and starts describing people.

Today, hyperconnectivity is tied to continuous digital presence, constant communication, permanent exposure, information overload, mental fatigue, and fragmented attention.

It’s no coincidence that The Burnout Society has moved from theory into lived experience.

And maybe that’s exactly what explains our current obsession with the 90s and 2000s. It’s not just aesthetic. It’s an attempt to return to a moment when stimulation was lower — or in some cases, almost nonexistent.

The internet existed, but there were no smartphones, no social media, no constant notifications. We chose when to be online (and God knows how much we celebrated the arrival of broadband because dial-up would drop the connection all the time — haha). Kids didn’t grow up with an iPad in their hands.

Time had a different texture.

And that changes everything about how we relate to image, consumption, and identity.

So when we see the return of figures like Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, it’s not just nostalgia. It’s a symptom. We’re not simply recycling aesthetics. We’re revisiting a moment where there was still space for silence.

And in fashion, this shows up very concretely. Campaigns, products, visual references all start looking back.

A clear example is the Skims campaign with Sabrina Carpenter in 2024.

The setting directly references a 90s teenage bedroom: CDs, a Discman, posters on the walls. Those who lived it, lived it. Those who didn’t, imagine it.

Another interesting example is Martin Margiela’s Tabis. Originally shown in 1988, they were always a strange shoe — almost uncomfortable to look at. But precisely because of that, they created the right kind of tension in a silhouette. The “wrong shoe” for the right outfit.

And suddenly, between 2023 and 2024, that same logic returns. Videos about the “wrong shoe theory” circulate for months. The Tabis reappear — whether through TikTok or through the desire to belong to a more insider way of looking at fashion.

None of this is random.

And the return of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy isn’t either.

We’re living in a moment of accelerated technological progress… but not necessarily the same level of personal or intellectual development.

Maybe that’s why we’re looking back.

And you?

Who are you in the middle of all of this?

With love,

Brisa

Writing today from Milano-IT.

It is no secret that one of Europe’s greatest attractions, especially for those who love fashion or shopping, is a good vintage store.

What no one ever tells you, though, is that vintage stores in Europe have very little to do with the ones we often find in Brazil. Vintage stores, at least the Italian ones, tend to function more or less like concept stores.

Let me explain. They are not usually built around the idea of showcasing specific brands in their selection. Are there vintage stores that do that? Yes. But the most interesting ones are often those that offer you a point of view, a curatorial identity, much like a concept store does.

In Italy, and I would dare to say in Europe as a whole, vintage stores operate through curation and concept. Through the owner’s personal taste in researching and selecting pieces, a collection is formed that naturally attracts clients who resonate with that aesthetic, or at least with the selection itself.

These stores also tend to have an extremely sharp sense of fashion trends and a unique understanding of what their clients are looking for, what they want to buy, and in many cases what they did not even know they needed.

People often say that one of the best ways to understand future trends is by observing what happens in the streets. I agree, but there is another method that can be just as revealing, if not even more refined: observing the selections inside vintage stores that cater to different kinds of customers.

It becomes a lesson in consumer behavior right in front of you, displayed through racks and racks of clothing. Sometimes they are difficult to understand. Sometimes they require patience. But they can also reveal incredible pieces, or truly unique ones.

I will go deeper into this topic in the future, but for now I wanted to begin introducing some ideas and perhaps clarify a few things so you can start looking at the vintage market from a slightly different perspective.

At least in Brazil, vintage stores tend to be much more tied to the luxury market and to brands that carry a certain level of recognition, even if they are entry-level brands for a world that suddenly feels more accessible through second-hand fashion.

That is also changing.

Studies suggest that the consumer of the future, or at least the near future according to WGSN, is increasingly searching for identity rather than for the status a brand might represent.

Carrying a Chanel bag does not seem to carry quite the same thrill it did years ago, even though the house’s new creative direction has produced beautiful products that are selling incredibly fast.

It seems that many people are now looking for pieces that elevate their status in a different way. Pieces where their personality and choices add value to the item, rather than the other way around.

With that said, and making it clear that I will explore this topic more deeply in the future, I wanted to share two vintage stores I discovered in Florence. At least for me, they reflect what true curation looks like. Their selections feel aligned with the current fashion landscape, with where trends appear to be heading, and they also offer a wide range of pieces that align with my personal style. At the same time, I think they could easily appeal to people whose taste has absolutely nothing to do with mine. Hahahahaha.

One of them, interestingly enough, is not even on Google Maps. And there is a reason for that, or at least something I have observed in the owners. They prefer to remain different and direct with their clients. They still trust what might be the most powerful form of brand communication in human history: word of mouth.

I probably do not even need to say that Italy as a whole works a lot like this, right?

Below you will find both addresses and my comments about these stores. I hope their selections are just as good to you as they were to me. Enjoy them, and later tell me if you visited and what you thought. I would truly love to know.

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Summary: I thought this newsletter was going to be about a Disney movie. Then one client couldn’t look at herself in the mirror for more than ten seconds. That experience sent me down a rabbit hole through mythology, history, behavioral science, fashion, and one simple question I don’t think we ask ourselves often enough.

I was watching Mulan on TV the other day for what must have been the thousandth time in my life. I need those moments to slow my synapses down and let my brain stop taking in so much stimulation so I can finally fall asleep. So I usually choose predictable things to watch, things I’ve already seen before or romantic comedies where I don’t have to think too much to understand the plot or where I already know the ending from the very beginning. Hahaha

But my biggest guilty pleasure is animated movies, and this time, something just hit me differently… After watching this film for the hundredth time, the song Reflection ended up renting a whole triplex in my head.

Who is that girl I see; Staring straight back at me?; Why is my reflection someone I don't know?; Somehow I cannot hide; Who I am, though I've tried; When will my reflection show; Who I am inside?

And well… I didn’t sleep, of course.

After years of looking at myself in the mirror, I found myself remembering every single time over the past few years that I actually recognized the person looking back at me. Those moments only started becoming more frequent after going through a long and painful period where I kept asking myself the very same question the song talks about: who is that person on the other side of the mirror?

The next day, I met with one of my clients to carefully go through every piece in her wardrobe and decide what would stay as part of one of the stages of her image consulting process and… well, she couldn’t look at her own reflection for more than ten seconds.

She put on the first blouse, looked at herself for ten seconds, turned around, and took it off to try on the next one. She put on the next blouse, looked at herself for ten seconds, turned around, and that’s when I asked her to look at herself again. She did. I started explaining the garment to her and what we could do to make it more interesting or better suited to her body shape. She listened to me while looking at the floor instead of the mirror, turned around, put on the next blouse, looked at herself for another ten seconds, and once again turned her back on her own reflection.

I started paying attention to what her body was telling me in the moments right before she had to look at herself in the mirror. She was clearly uncomfortable. She would neatly fold the clothes right after showing them to me, almost as if she needed to put everything back in order. Her shoulders were rolled forward and down, she kept looking at the floor… Her body was asking for help.

By the third blouse, I asked her to look at herself for more than ten seconds and… the tears started falling. It was time to pause and understand what we could take away from that experience without letting it hurt her in that way.

In the end, after a long and welcoming conversation, we managed to go through her entire wardrobe, stopping for more than ten seconds in front of the mirror each time so we could logically understand the shape of each garment and what it was doing for her, so that the pain wouldn’t have to repeat itself anymore.

I’ve come to realize that looking at your own reflection in the mirror represents so much more than we tend to expect.

From a physics perspective, a mirror is simply a reflective surface that, when struck by light, sends the beam back either to its point of origin or in a different direction depending on the position of the surface. It would all be quite simple if that return (or redirection maybe?) came without any noise.

Sometimes, though, it comes like an arrow. Like a scream. Like a cry for help. Carrying memories, emotional weight, history…

If we think about Brazil’s history, it’s often said that Indigenous peoples would trade almost anything for mirrors. Countless literary metaphors explore the ability of a simple mirror to reflec an image. In architecture, mirrors are a great way to make a space feel larger or brighter. During the Middle Ages, some churches regarded mirrors as tools of the devil. Some even say they represent another dimension or act as a portal to one. In cinema, mirrors have been used extensively, from horror films to animated movies, becoming central elements and even protagonists in some of the most memorable scenes.

In mythology, we have the story of Narcissus, a young man who falls in love with his own reflection in the water, only to fall in and drown.

It gave rise to one of the most well-known sayings in Portuguese:

Narcissus thinks everything that isn’t a mirror is ugly.

Beyond reinforcing ideas of mysticism, the sacred, the forbidden, and the misunderstood, it seems that:

For centuries, mirrors and reflections have been associated with vanity.

But not vanity in its healthy sense. Excessive vanity. Exhibitionism. Superficiality.

So much is said about mirrors, yet so little is said about what we actually find when we’re faced with our own reflection. And that got me thinking:

Have you ever stopped to think about your relationship with your own reflection?

Looking back at my younger self while trying to answer that question, I realized that, at several different moments in my life, something very difficult happened… and I simply stopped looking at myself in the mirror.

Whenever I share this during lectures or classes, I find that many people say exactly the same thing.

And while trying to understand why, I came to a very simple conclusion:

The mirror simply doesn’t lie.

It will show you the weight you’ve gained or lost. It will show the bruise left by an accident you’ve been through (and for the purpose of this newsletter, a bruise can also mean a wound carried by the body or by the soul). It will show the hair you’ve lost. It will show how your face has changed with age…

Looking into the mirror places you front and center with one question: does what you’re seeing truly represent you?

And can I tell you something?

More often than not, people who don’t look at themselves simply don’t want to see what will appear there.

But what if I told you you’re not alone?

From a behavioral science perspective, every course will tell you that human behavior moves in cycles, and right now we’re living through a revival of the 2000s, aren’t we? In fashion, in culture, and in life, old conversations inevitably come back.

More than twelve years ago (and if you remember it, you remember it) there was a movement called mirror fasting, where people deliberately stopped looking at themselves in the mirror. Some later reported that constantly checking their reflection before the experiment had actually made them more vain or, depending on how you choose to interpret the word, more consumed by their own appearance.

The whole idea was to avoid looking at their own bodies because of the social or personal discomfort surrounding whatever they expected to find in the reflection.

Does that sound familiar?

Studies on the neurocognitive model of mirror self-perception explain that “mirroring is a moment of understanding and evaluation. There is an initial understanding shaped by the lens through which we see the world, together with an evaluation — a personal moment that gives meaning to the reflection.”

In other words, after our brain processes the image, our emotional state is what ultimately explains (and gives meaning to) what we see.

So much is said about mirrors, yet so little is said about what we actually find when we’re faced with our own reflection.

And that got me thinking: How’s your relationship with your own reflection?

Back in 2022, consumer behavior reports predicted that, starting in 2023, we would enter what they called the era of hyper-fatigue.

And we did.

And somehow, we’re still exhausted.

Information overload, new technologies constantly emerging, wars (Ukraine in 2022 and Israel in 2023), the climate crisis, the rise of digital detox movements as people tried to distance themselves from the hyperconnectivity that followed the pandemic, the explosive growth of the wellness industry, the search for a life with greater meaning and purpose after widespread burnout… all of these factors have contributed to an increasing sense of disconnection from ourselves.

We’re living in a time of constant exposure to perfectly curated images on Instagram feeds while feeling deeply disconnected from them. And in that context, the mirror becomes a portal to the discomfort of emotional truth waiting beneath the surface and perhaps, to the recovery of our self-esteem and, why not, our sense of vanity.

Maybe that’s what the mirror is still for.

Not as a reflection of an unattainable ideal, but as a quiet (and sometimes painful) invitation to return to ourselves.

If the image in the feed is curation, the reflection is memory.

And reconnecting with that reflection may be the first step toward remembering who we are, without needing a caption.

See you in the next issue.

With love,

Brisa

Writing today from Florence-IT.

You may also like:

• Just Think About It 2 - Have you been telling your brain that it’s time to work?

• Just Think About It 1 - Anyone can wear a nice outfit

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Before the pandemic, what happened most in most people's lives was: waking up, having a quick coffee, getting ready really quickly to catch the bus, car, Uber or whatever to go to work, right?

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I was thinking about this with a client today. We spend our lives going in and out of stores – some more than others – carrying bags full of clothes or opening our closets and finding everything inside. But, inevitably, we come to the conclusion that: anyone can wear a nice outfit! Telling a story or being intentional is another thing. And we don't even stop to think about it...

During this journey, I had clients who went to stores and bought the entire look from the mannequin in the window to wear on a day trip. Like that. Without thinking about whether it represented who they were in some way or what, in that look, really caught their attention.

I had clients who bought something just to replace a specific piece that was already very worn out in their collection. Like that. As if they were on autopilot! "I need a blouse, I'm going to buy a blouse. Whatever blouse that blouse is! It just has to be a blouse and not cost an arm and a leg."

Financial realities aside, I've also had clients who were compulsive shoppers. They had tons of clothes in their closets with the tags still on, and yet they felt they needed more.

Anyway, on different levels - it's important to say that I suggested therapy to all of them - it all comes down to a lack of self-knowledge, but also to the fact that we weren't educated to understand the value not only of our image, but also of our expression.

Today I heard from a client:

And that phrase brought to mind a series of reflections. One of them was a quote from the movie Air, in which Sonny Vaccaro, supposedly speaking to Michael Jordan during negotiations, says: "a shoe is just a shoe until someone steps into it, then it has meaning. The rest of us just want the chance to touch that greatness."

This came to mind because, in the mentoring program I'm part of, Law Roach told us in the very first class that the way he approaches styling and clothes revolves around the idea that "a shoe is not just a shoe. At least I don't see it that way, but rather as an element that makes up an entire image that I'm designing to communicate exactly what I want."

That's right. Clothes, by themselves, are just clothes. They don't establish communication, and if they do, it's in a disorderly and unintentional way – dangerous, huh? Imagine communicating sloppiness in an environment where you need to convey sophistication?

Now, clothes dressing someone, my friends... They are positioning, strategy, storytelling, expression, empowerment, confidence!

Clothes have the power to make you feel accepted, improve your mood, reduce your anxiety, and increase your confidence. They can transport you through time, bring back memories, conquer spaces, bring smiles…

I feel at home when I hear something like this. It’s no secret that I’m a big believer in the idea that our clothes tell stories. I’ve felt the effect of this on my own skin, and one day I’ll come back to tell this story again. But the point is that I only realized this when I became aware of who I was and what I was transmitting all this time. And that’s exactly what my client realized too.

She realized that the choices she had made within her collection didn’t reflect who she is – with a hint of not knowing how to use what she had to her advantage too – since she was acquiring what people told her everyone had to have in their wardrobe!

Just think about it: only you can be you, right?

Why would you choose to be “anyone”?

Everything is symbolic.

With love,

Brisa

Writing today from São Paulo-BR.