T.CIPOLLETTA

Thais Cipolletta used her previous experience as a womenswear fashion designer applying draping and tailoring skills to develop this collection of Fashion Artefacts made in leather.

 

The final collection of six handbags that composes Thais’ Masters Project for MA in Fashion Artefact were all hand-crafted by the designer following a luxury standard - some of them taking up to three weeks to be made.

 

Exploring matters of cultural and personal identity, the collection brings together elements of the Brazilian culture combined with European aesthetics, featuring the Brazilian’s Modernism from the 20’s and the global Constructivism art movement.

 

From Lygia Clark, a Brazilian artist that had a longstanding influence on the Constructivism Movement, Thais brought the inspiration to create three dimensional pieces out of flat elements, playing with its dynamic and coming up with impressive organic shapes.

From the same artist came also a decisive factor in the collection, which is the questioning about the function of the art frame. Lygia Clark questioned the role of the frame on creating both a distance between the artwork and the spectator and enough space to isolate the work in order to highlight it. Inspired by this, Thais takes the idea even further, appropriating what could be seen as a boundary and slicing it into pieces – allowing movement, function and bringing it closer to the body.

 

Another artist that strongly influenced this collection was Tarsila do Amaral, whose work marked the Brazilian Modernism around the 1920’s. Tarsila explored the concept of Anthropophagism, which supports the idea of agglutinating different cultures (the European in that case) in order to constitute a proper Brazilian identity.

Tarsila’s organic and distorted shapes, as well as vivid colours, are easily spot in Thais’ collection, and the idea of appropriating a mix of cultures and identities in order to create your own seem to establish a considerable dialogue with Thais’ life experience, as a Brazilian fashion designer living in the cosmopolitan London.

 

With all these inspirations as background, Thais Cipolletta gathered her experiences with womenswear and accessories design to develop a collection that honours craftsmanship and highlights her personal experience of such a rich cultural blend.

 

Thais’ hand-crafted leather collection expresses her talent on translating a personal background into fashion, aligning her particular identity to universal trends and, beyond that, coming up with outstanding visuals.