LEFREAKCESTCHICC

I’m writing about my brand while looking at a photo of my father. It’s a strange thing to admit, but it’s also the truest one. I look at him, and I understand that everything I do started there, from his way of looking at things, from that stubbornness of his in refusing to let die what time had wounded. My father was a devotee of restoration: he saw beauty where others saw only ruin. He taught me that objects have a breath, that you just have to know how to listen to it.

Lefreakcestchicc was born in 2021, while I was taking my final high school exams. It wasn’t a project planned at a desk, it just happened. It happened because I’m an eclectic soul, raised in an eclectic family, and I’ve never managed to stay still on a single goal. I had too many things inside me, too many directions, too many worlds I belonged to. The brand was the first place where they could all stay together, without anyone asking which one was the right one.

And then there’s my mother. An architect too, but above all a woman wrapped in the extraordinary, never, in any fold of her life, touched by the ordinary. Her creations, the houses she designs, her friends, the home I grew up in: everything around her seems to belong to another grammar. From her I learned that the extraordinary isn’t sought far away. It’s a way of choosing, every day, what and whom to surround yourself with. It’s a way of looking, even before it’s a result.

“With mom and dad I learned to pick up old objects again, to love them, to appreciate them for what they had been.”

Everything really comes from them. From them comes my obsession with vintage, with fabrics that had already lived something before me. The fabrics of my latest collection are almost all recovered, sought out one by one. Some are church lace from the 1920s, materials that have passed through ceremonies, candles, silences, light filtered through stained-glass windows. Transforming them into something else isn’t just a design gesture: it’s the way my father taught me to be in the world, applied to fabric.

My latest collection blends timeless Italian taste with posh English elegance. I grew up inside both, warmth and rigor, matter and detail, tweed and linen, sun and rain. They were never two separate things for me; they were simply the two languages of home.

And then there’s Vera. My great-grandmother. A designer, extremely elegant, a woman who had opened a boutique called AREV in London near Harrods, on New Bridge Street, and who dressed the English upper class and the Queen Mother of England. My father took me to discover her clothes, kept inside trunks that no one had opened for years. They were there, folded with an almost sacred care, waiting for someone to look at them again. When I lifted that lid, I understood that I hadn’t found clothes: I had found a piece of my origin.

Around all of this is my family, large and eclectic, where every member is a character. Truly: each one is distinctive, full of personality, recognizable in a room full of people like a character straight out of a Wes Anderson film. There’s the one who collects, the one who draws, the one who talks with their hands, the one who stays silent while making more noise than anyone else. I grew up inside this choreography, and I believe the brand does nothing more than translate it into fabrics, into cuts, into details that seem out of place and then, suddenly, are exactly where they need to be.

And in these last few months, into this choreography, she has entered too: a dear friend of mine, who started to be part of the project and became, in a very short time, an important piece of it. I bring the visions, the images, the obsessions that can’t be explained; she brings her feet on the ground, when mine tend not to touch it. She believed in this project in the moments when I was the first to doubt it. My Art History professor always reminded me of this: Socrates already knew it, alone you talk to yourself, together true thoughts are born.

I look again at the photo of my father. Everything is in it: my mother’s way of looking at the extraordinary, Vera’s trunk, the church lace, Italy and England, the family that raised me in color, and today also the person with whom this story keeps being written. The collection is exactly the point where all these things, finally, touch.