The most interesting people I know are collectors. Though not always in the formal sense, their collections are really collections of a life: experiences, references, books, film, stories, art, furniture, jewelry, and of course, clothing. Their homes, wardrobes, and very being become physical evidence of everywhere they have been, what they’ve learned, and that which they’ve decided is worth carrying forward.

I was once told to “taste the buffet of life”. I’m convinced these people have their forks and knives constantly at the ready.

Conscious consumption is often framed around buying less and wasting less. Valid. But I believe my version of this shows a more pleasurable side. Buy fewer things, yes, but buy the things you want to live with for a very long time.

When you choose well, your joy compounds. The possessions around you stop becoming mere possessions and begin to form part of the creative expression of your life. Things you value, made by people whose stories you know, holding meaning and providing a little hit of dopamine that comes from living among things you find beautiful.

Becoming a collector is not about owning the most, but about owning the things that are most worth keeping, for you.

Here, a few forever pieces that you may consider adding to your collection.

The Pouf Lighter Necklace by Borne Edit

If you’re a L’étude loyalist, you’ll know Mariana Ertmann’s Borne Edit well. If you’re new here, we interviewed her for this profile and fell in love. The 14K gold-plated lighter necklace is one of many truly elegant pieces Mariana dreams up. The necklace, adored with a fine silk tassel and detachable matching chain, is a wearable object and decorative one, all at once. Ignite your candle. Ignite your Virginia Slim. Whatever you choose to do with it will feel like a luxurious treat with every use.

Antique Fringed Silk-Jacquard Scarf by Merci, C’est Vintage

While we’re at it, you may also know Mariana Vergara’s Merci, C’est Vintage from this time last year. This recent design of hers genuinely made my jaw drop. Her taste is impeccable, so it wasn’t a surprise, but nonetheless, wow. The scarf is made to be worn traditionally around the neck or as a belt across your waist. The kind of piece that can pull an entire look into focus.

Vintage Silver Seashell Spoon Set by Lucia Zolea

I find myself scrolling Lucia Zolea’s curation quite often. From clothing to jewelry to objects like these spoons, each piece is to be treasured. I imagine these spoons in particular becoming part of a beautiful routine, stirring your morning coffee in a meditative state. They’re a piece of simple luxury worth considering.

Pleated Lamp by Jenje

Josh Jen is an architect, digital artist, and designer based in London. His designs reinterpret historical garments and cultural references through contemporary materials and fabrication techniques. The result: objects that both catch your eye and tell a story.

Iceberg by Leighton Bannock

It would not be a proper collector’s curation without the mention of art: the most evocative way to dress a room. Leighton Bannock's work immediately comes to mind. Reminiscent of Alex Katz, but often centered on female figures, her paintings leave space for interpretation. The meaning never feels entirely fixed. The work becomes almost as much a reflection of the viewer’s state as of what is pictured.

Satin Upcycled Jacket by Marlene Rougier

Marlene Rougier’s made-to-order pieces come in limited drops but with every one, there are always several pieces I immediately covet. Her designs are made by hand from upcycled or deadstock fabric, often sourced from luxury fashion houses, at her studio in Bordeaux. Her drops are worth tracking for that truly one-of-a-kind addition to your collection. (Next one: this Sunday!)

Thank you for being here,

Kelly

My thesis is broken down into two categories:

1. The Rebellious: The trendsetting population who defy the current norm in search of a sense of individuality. The second everyone else is doing “it”, it no longer feels like theirs. So off they go looking for something that does.

2. The Subconscious: Slower to change than The Rebellious, this group doesn’t quite realize why they are craving something different. They just know the norm has begun to feel boring, overdone, and unsatisfying. So they start to reach for something else.

I sense both populations constantly. With endless exposure to what other people are wearing, doing, thinking, it’s become increasingly difficult to find something that actually feels like our own. Similar to the increasing popularity of vintage and antique pieces, that one-of-a-kind item feels more valuable than ever.

At the same time, we’ve observed an increasing interest in the analog. Vintage cameras and grainy photography. Discmans and VCRs. Your favorite new album released on cassette. It’s a psychological phenomenon I’d like to investigate more thoroughly.

Until that time comes, I’m sat here reflecting. In the age of Artificial Intelligence, while we collectively try to understand how drastically it might reshape our lives, we seem increasingly drawn to reminders of what computers are incapable of.

Pressure, texture, physical contact. Our senses alive all at once, able to experience an earth that existed before iPhones did. As AI becomes progressively embedded in our lives, perhaps it makes sense that we participate in the slingshot effect. Not behind a screen, but in things we can literally put our human hands on.

Craft seems to answer both impulses at once. It grounds us in something physical, while giving us back a sense of ownership. What better way to quiet the anxiety of a robotic future than to spend a little time resisting it? And if uniqueness is what you’re reaching for, why not make the thing yourself?

True to L’étude form, I took this not only as an opportunity to reinvigorate DIY, but also as an excuse to discover more founders and creatives.

Please read, enjoy, and then slam your laptop shut and use your hands for whatever good you can dream up.

Patterns with Manon Aguilar

Manon Aguilar singlehandedly reinvigorated my love for sewing. Her designs are simple enough to recreate, yet creative enough to feel one-of-a-kind. You can begin with a simple rectangular clutch before graduating to something like this more intensive trench. Options allow you to choose your own adventure, each leaving you with a piece that is uniquely yours.

Lighting Sculpture with Luciana Perezre

I discovered Luciana Perezre’s Como Demo via the workshops she hosts in NYC. Rumor has it there are unannounced dates in LA too, shhhh. But the good news if you’re based in neither city: Como Demo carries its Paper Lamp Kit and Online Course so you can craft your own lighting design from the comfort of literally anywhere. A conversation piece made with your own hands. Can you imagine?

Clay Jewelry with Riley Hill

Based in Vancouver, Riley Hill both makes her own jewelry and teaches you to create your own with silver clay. The perfect complement to your Simuero stack. The Oh Okay starter kit includes all the pieces you need, plus gemstones, to begin your handcrafted journey. An iconic gift or a meaningful keepsake.

Beadwork with Raquel Navarro

Rockii Studios sessions take place in a greenhouse in Silver Lake. Need I say more? Freshwater pearls, glass, ceramic, metal beads, pendants. And doing it all alongside friends, old and new. Save this for your next trip to LA.

Let us know what you’re making next. And then, seriously, laptop shut.

Speak soon,

Kelly

This week, I was doing just that. And, as typical, I stumbled on a treasure trove of women who are creating works of art, sharing inspired perspectives, and designing pieces we are all likely coveting. Tell me your favorite, unless you can’t choose one.

Janet Asante Sullivan

Born in Ghana, Asante Sullivan now lives in the US. Her art captures time, atmosphere, and inner life, made clear by the work you see above. On top of this obvious talent, she is an executive leadership coach for leaders in law, tech, and nonprofit organizations. We love a woman who does it all.

Palengke

Many of my best discoveries come in the form of shoes. These shoes? Designed by Jillian Santos and Paulina Dayrit, two twenty-something friends based in the Philippines with instinct and taste driving a new visual playground.

Ayllón

Originally from Buenos Aires, Inés Ortiz de Rozas’s designs feel equally like wearables and collectables. Thoughtful, considered, her collections, which now include handbags, remain understated without losing personality and presence. I want every single piece.

Grece Ghanem

I’m cheating. I didn’t discover Grece this week but I will always come back to her. Her mission statement: fashion and confidence as style has no age. It’s sad that we need to be reminded of this fact, but I’m glad she’s here to continue to prove it to be true.

Studio Solhem

Henni Gavatin is busy having a good time and it shows in every piece she creates. Based in Stockholm, each of her pieces, from lighting to wall art to decorative objects, are handcrafted and made as limited editions. The conversation piece you knew you needed.

Hernán Herdez

My one-sided love affair with Puerto Rican designer, Melissa Hernández’s brand began with an ear cuff. Her often two-toned pieces ranging from fine to demi-fine jewelry, carry both an understated elegance and an experimental quirkiness. A combination I have come to adore.

Rennk Studios

An immediate add to my things I want but can’t have list — this sold out jacket that connected me with Pelin Ersavaş and Özlem Şahin Gök’s brand, Rennk. Pelin is based in Los Angeles. Özlem in Turkey. Together, they create and curate a collection of Eastern Mediterranean-inspired vibrant pieces you will yearn for.

Zoísoley

Newly obsessed with ceramics and forever obsessed with pieces made by the hands of women, I discovered Artemis Sofia’s Silver Clay Collection and, naturally, loved. Imagine. Sunday morning, you pour yourself a hot matcha in your Zoísoley mug with hands dripping in Hernán Herdez. It just makes sense.

Steele

I recently acquired this Steele Evelyn Jacket and we have become codependent. Alongside a pair of Bermuda cotton shorts I wore all summer long, I am a newly converted Steele superfan. Founded by Jessica Reid out of Melbourne, I can confidently recommend supporting if you need to add some playfulness to your wardrobe.

Cristina Vázquez

Cristina uses watercolor, gouache, watercolor pencil marker and marker to render the ripples of water so precisely I initially mistook her work for photography. But the magic is that it isn’t. Spanish artist Cristina Vázquez pulls from joyful moments—like the feeling of floating freely in water—and recreates them entirely by hand.

House Janolo

I am a firm believer in buying gifts for yourself. The good ones, too. Not just the practical treats. House Janolo makes the kind of pieces that feel worthy of being wrapped, saved, and given with intention, even when the recipient is you. Founded by sisters Dujanah and Oloof Jarrar, the brand creates pieces that feel singular, personal, and indulgent enough to mark an occasion.

Sofi Perazzo

Whatever is going on inside the mind of Miami-based photographer, Sofi Perazzo, I want in. Her work evokes the freedom of summertime, skin that’s been kissed by the sun, all while quietly asking what it means to be alive. Dig into her work when you’re in the mood to feel something. Something…necessary.

By M(art)a Studios

Give me texture. Give me color. Give me Marta Studios. Marta Sbaragli was born in Arezzo, Italy, to parents who encouraged her love of art from a young age. Bless all the creative parents out there for helping work like this make its way in the world. After studying design in Berlin, she launched the brand in 2023. Her pieces carry a distinctly German edge with unmistakable Italian craftsmanship. Brava, Marta.

Ciao for now,

Kelly

That is, at least, what happened to me.

I started L’étude to discover the faces and names behind independent brands and to use that discovery to motivate my own purchases, and fashion investments, if you will.

From there, it grew legs that looked something like an interview / biographical series aimed at inspiring people from often marginalized groups to start something of their own. A side hustle. A creative practice. Whatever it is that makes you recognize your capabilities, reconnect to your creativity, and feel closer to yourself.

Looking back, I now realize I was included, if not occasionally the sole member, of the “you” in that mission statement.

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I moved to Los Angeles in 2015, a week after graduating college, for an internship at the very same place I bought my own prom dresses: BCBGMaxAzria. In less than a year, I became Max Azria’s assistant. Wild times, to say the least.

As a serial monogamist with zero commitment issues, I decided I would spend the rest of my career at BCBG, working up the ranks to one day sit on whatever the golden throne of the C-suite looked like.

Instead, Max left the company and took me with him.

We hustled together for a year or so before I realized I needed a bit more security, and perhaps an HR department. Love to Max, we got through a lot together, but boundaries were basically nonexistent. Zero time off and so much cigarette smoking in the office that I would wake up with black nostrils. (Note: I was not the one smoking, usually. Max went through over a pack a day and wouldn’t let me open my windows because the street was too loud.)

Then, I got an opportunity to work for another entrepreneur who founded and led an on-demand beauty app around the time services like Glamsquad and Priv were taking off. She was also heavily involved in fashion partnerships and content creation, so, for me, it felt something close to perfect.

Looking back, it was not. But it shaped me in more ways than I’ll probably ever have the words to express because they are, mostly, subconscious. She opened my eyes to the idea that I could build something of my own. A dream I’d always had but lacked the confidence to execute.

I started working for her mid-July, and by September we were spending over thirty codependent days traveling together to hit every fashion week back to back. NYC to London to Milan to Paris, back to London, back to NYC. It was pure chaos and stress and overwhelm and I cried at least six times, but I would never give it up.

Again, though, the tears eventually led me to reach for some more stability.

I got the opportunity to work for the CEO of the world’s largest music company. They DM’d me on LinkedIn and I assumed it was spam. (Never underestimate the power of LinkedIn. Just this year I got a DM to interview for a dream job in Paris. I wasn’t offered the job in the end, but that’s not the point.)

That was over eight years ago.

During that time, I studied for my Master’s at Northwestern, got promoted to a marketing role, and eventually received my crown as “Marketing Director.” The relationship between job titles and corporate environments is something to be studied.

Eventually, though, a question began surfacing: is this the environment I want to spend my life in?

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And as a Marketing Director, I simultaneously started L’étude, then called C’est Cool.

And now you’re mostly brought up to speed.

I started reaching out to founders, coincidentally many around my age and female, and writing about their brands and stories. Alongside the utmost admiration I was feeling came envy. Every single founder was doing work that lit them up in a way you couldn’t quite describe but could see very clearly on their faces. A look I wanted.

One after another, they told me how they got there. And one after another, I filed it away and went back to my corporate office.

At some point I realized I was asking slightly selfish questions in slightly different ways: How did you get the courage to leave? What made you decide the security wasn’t worth it anymore? What did it feel like on the other side?

It really smacked me in the face this May when I spoke with Sofia Ortiz about El Quadrado, the space she built in Madrid. She told me something along the lines of: she knew that no matter where she ended up, she couldn’t keep living her life miserable at a job she didn’t love.

No grand plan. No safety net. Just the clarity that staying had become the greater risk.

Without her knowing much of anything about my professional background, I felt targeted. And slowly, then with more and more confidence, I knew a big change in my life was imminent.

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About thirty days ago, I said goodbye to my office for the very last time after more than eight years.

I have no title. I have no salary or 401(k) contributions. But I have a community and aspirations and passion. I have a publication that spent the last year showing me, through every story I published, that the life I was waiting for permission to build was actually possible.

Sofia gave me courage. And Mariana, and Alex, and every other woman whose story I had the privilege of learning. They inadvertently held my hand along the way, and I hope there will be people who can one day say L’étude did the same for them.

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A few exciting notes about what comes next.

We’re entering a new era, with newfound time and freedom to have more conversations, follow more curiosities, and get more creative. I’m also not leaving marketing behind, but developing my own independent marketing practice in tandem. Perhaps I’ll share more here later.

For now, if you’re new here, welcome. L’étude is where I obsess over art, design, entrepreneurship, and the people behind all of it. If you’ve been here: thank you for giving me the encouragement to build it.

Subscribe now

I spent the last year studying people who trust in themselves. Now we find out what happens when I do the same.

Speak very soon!
Kelly

It’s been a moment. While L’étude was quietly stepping into a new season of its own, summer arrived, and with it, a wardrobe question worth taking seriously. These are a few of the brands I found myself returning to. Color, texture, and design that feels genuinely original. And, as typical, female-founded.

Ucha

My reintroduction to Ibero American design came through Sofia Ortiz, and I haven’t stopped finding remarkable female designers from the region since. There’s a quality that connects them: work that is playful and precise at once, deeply experimental with fabric and color, and clearly made by someone who loves what she’s doing.

Ucha, founded by Lucia Guillermina Cerato, launched as a contemporary jewelry project in Buenos Aires in 2013 and now operates from a studio in Madrid. A single piece might reference glass beads, vintage resin flowers, and materials sourced from the 1980s. The invention and craftsmanship are genuinely staggering. These are the pieces that stop people on the street. They won’t be able to help themselves.

Soleil Soleil

Emma and Isabel's Sydney-based studio begins many pieces with hand-painted or hand-drawn designs that are then translated onto textiles. Every piece feels like summertime. Picture the woman who washes her hair in the sea, whose style looks effortless because it simply is. The ease of someone who knows herself and is enjoying the life she has. Whose routine consists of walks to the local farmers market, whose diet is mainly whatever was caught that morning. She wears Soleil Soleil. I already can't wait to put on my newest purchases and feel exactly like her.

Cala de la Cruz

Textile design’s favorite season is summer. It’s an undisputed fact, and we couldn’t possibly put together this list without Carolina Lopez’s Cala de la Cruz. The name itself is taken from the Spanish word for a rounded bay where the sea rests calmly. What better place to be kissed by the sun.

The brand was founded in Cali, Colombia, where every style is made by local small businesses. Elevated resort wear with a real story behind it, touched by hands that hold a genuine love of craft and an appreciation for a well-lived life. That’s the whole point, isn’t it.

At First Sight

If you’ve ever spent time on the Mediterranean, you know it in your body before you know it in your mind. The reason so many designers leave that place with something new in them, something they have to put somewhere.

Judit Oms put it into her brand. Based in Barcelona and founded in 2021, At First Sight is a celebration of femininity: warm, romantic, sensual. Her pieces carry a quiet confidence rather than announcing it. Anyone I see wearing them feels like someone I want to know. Girls who get it. What is it, exactly? That same feeling the Mediterranean puts in your bones. The one that’s impossible to name and impossible to forget.

Summer, at its best, has a way of making everything feel possible. These brands carry that quality in them. A reminder that you don’t need to be in Sydney or Barcelona or floating in the Mediterranean to feel it. You just need the right thing on your back.

À bientôt,

Kelly

When I launched C’est Cool about eight months ago, I had no idea what it would become. Looking back at the early visual iterations, I still gasp a little. But this isn’t about looks. This is about evolution.

C’est Cool holds a special place. She was the identity that got me started, put my voice into the world, and connected me with founders I’m in genuine awe of. She felt like a warm hug. The encouraging older sister who always believed in you.

I love her cheekiness. The idea that “coolness” isn’t objective. That neither he nor she defines it, but you do. It’s an observation made through an individual lens.

But I also recognized that the cheekiness had become a cloak. A way of not taking this thing too seriously. When I tell people the name, it still feels fun. It just doesn’t feel like her anymore.

So we evolve. Into something that reflects the weight and intention of the founders, creators, and makers we celebrate. As Olivia Cummings once said simply: “It was never a little thing for me. It was always a big thing.”

It was always a big thing.

L’étude, pronounced lay-tood-uh, translates to the study. Exactly what this is. A study of creativity, entrepreneurship, and what happens when people step outside the rooms they were placed in. A search for the things we love, the people worth supporting, and everything that lights us up.

Welcome to L’étude and thank you for continuing this journey with me.

A few favorites below to catch up on.

Her brand, Cleopatra’s Bling, provides detailed historical references to each piece it carries, never missing the opportunity to give credit where credit is due. Her socials tell stories of family and found friends she has designed pieces for over the years. The visual world of the brand, not to mention the designs themselves, exude a warmth that envelopes you. Something bigger than the sum of its parts that could only come into existence through someone who genuinely loves what they do.

When I did get the chance to speak with Olivia, she did not disappoint.

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Olivia grew up in Melbourne, in a household where creativity was so woven into daily life that she didn’t realize until much later it wasn’t everyone’s baseline. Her father was a classical musician and teacher. Her mother studied fine arts. Her brother is now a classical pianist. There weren’t many screens. There was a lot of time outside, and drawing inside, and inventing things. She and her brother were, by her own cheerful admission, little weirdos who dressed up as spies and roamed the garden led only by only vast imaginations.

That same creative household supported her curious mind, and that same curiosity supported her exploration of the world. At sixteen, she spent a year in an exchange program in Berlin. She finished high school in Melbourne, learning Arabic, then French. Six years spent in Paris. A master’s in brand management. Then a marketing job where her creativity was being used for other people’s businesses. Feeling the persistent awareness that she had a lot to dream up, she acknowledged this was not the forum.

Then she went to Istanbul for two weeks on her own and was completely floored.

“It’s just such a melting pot of aesthetic,” she says. “It was the seat of so many empires, all of which had their own really strong sense of aesthetic, and all of that together was an overwhelming visual experience.”

At twenty-three, she packed up her life in Paris and moved there. Her parents, at this point well practiced in letting Olivia follow her instincts wherever they led, eventually came to visit and fell in love with the city themselves.

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Istanbul gave her proximity to craft. She spent years in the Grand Bazaar, learning from generational jewelers who had been doing this work for their whole lives, and their parents’ lives before. She learned wax moulding, lost wax casting, hot enamel work, hand engraving. She was earnest, curious, and continued to be welcomed through doors that tend to stay closed to people who treat these places as photo ops.

“I just don’t have this concept of fear,” she says. “I wasn’t aware of anything that could be an obstacle for me. Everything I can overcome and everything I can turn into a positive.”

From there, the brand that began as an Etsy shop found its footing across the world. She sold pieces directly to people who found her through an early blog. Press began to trickle in from Australia. She traveled to Bali to develop production, establishing the same relationship the brand holds today with an all-female R&D studio there. She developed fine production connections in Florence, where the stone setters are, by her assessment, unparalleled. Istanbul remained the creative heartbeat, where the hot enamel work happens and where stone engraving in the ancient style is still practiced by the people she met in her early twenties.

Slowly and organically, it did all turn positive, and Cleopatra’s Bling came to life. Cleopatra as a symbol of the East. Bling as a symbol of the West. Two halves of the aesthetic that Istanbul embodies.

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There is a version of this story that reads as a tidy arc: adventurous young woman leaves Australia, discovers Istanbul, builds a beautiful brand, lives happily ever after. But that version is incomplete.

The fuller version includes a move to Naples and a flight back to Australia when her father was diagnosed with leukemia. Years of lockdowns, and a life-altering loss. It includes becoming a mother, a daughter born into a family that had just lost its patriarch, a new life arriving in the wake of another ending.

Olivia shares this story because it is inseparable from who she is as a designer and businessperson. The loss condensed her available hours and clarified what she wanted to spend them on. It deepened her understanding of what jewelry actually means. Not as an accessory, but as what she calls “ritualistic adornment”. Something worn to mark the moments that matter, to carry the people we love on our bodies when they can no longer be beside us.

True to that statement, Olivia’s own stack tells her life in the way that only jewelry can.

A jade bangle hand carved in India and a serpent head bangle in solid gold. Rings that mark different chapters. Her wedding stack she chose with her husband. He has a cognac diamond of his own. “He’s my bride,” she says, laughing. “We chose them together.”

On another finger sits a diamond she bought the year after her father’s passing. Her father loved diamonds. The higher the carat the better, he’d say. Before he passed, the two of them went together to a diamond dealer, chose a stone, and Olivia designed a ring that he gave to her mother. After he was gone, she had her own made. She calls it the Egeria Ring.

Stacked alongside it sits a solid gold enamel band, the Angarika Ring, hand engraved with colored pigment pressed into the channels and fired in an enamel oven. She wears two of these enamel rings, both designed in Jaipur with local artisans while there during her father’s last trip overseas. The second, the Kamala Ring, holds a hard-poured lotus flower and 31 diamonds. The lotus, she acknowledges, grows out of the mud.

Every ring holds an emotional past. Every stone is a choice made with intention. This is how Olivia speaks about jewelry and this is how she actually wears it.

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The Cleopatra’s Bling collections, three demi-fine and one fine per year, are rooted in historical research that Olivia credits openly and specifically. She is categorical about this, adamant about not claiming to have invented anything. She is referencing, honoring, and trying to keep alive.

Olivia meets with customers often to design custom pieces. They come on calls and tell her about their weddings, divorces, children being born, their losses. Just like she has with her own, she designs those stories into jewelry.

For a brand this rooted in people, sustainability was never going to be just about materials. Rather, Olivia views it across three pillars.

First, material. Recycled silver, a gold recycling service that allows clients to bring retired pieces and remake them into something new. A stone supply chain so short she was texting her Australian sapphire dealer the morning of our call. She does not use lab-grown diamonds, as she finds the energy requirements and certification transparency genuinely troubling, preferring natural stones she can fully trace. Next, human. Partner studios vetted against Responsible Jewellery Council standards. And lastly, cultural. She works directly with the craftspeople who hold the techniques, rather than learning something and taking it elsewhere to be reproduced more cheaply.

“That would be the soul of the brand gone.”

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Today, Olivia lives in Madrid, with her husband and daughter, Alba. Her daughter was due on the thirtieth of September. She arrived two and a half hours before midnight on the eighteenth of October. Olivia’s father’s birthday is the nineteenth.

Olivia tells the story with wonder and steadiness. She has thought about what it means, and has made peace with the timing without making it smaller than it is.

The nurses from her father’s hospital stay are still in Olivia’s life. She remembers going into her father’s ward and seeing the nurses wearing Cleopatra’s Bling. Her father was her biggest proponent. One nurse, a blood scientist who had done many of her father’s tests, followed Olivia through her entire pregnancy as part of her midwifery studies, and is now one of her closest friends. Another nurse’s future husband reached out to her the week of our conversation asking about a ring. She calls them her dad’s angels.

“Things like this align all the time,” she says. “I will think of something, and then it kind of just starts to manifest. I know that sounds super weird.”

It doesn’t sound weird. It sounds like someone paying close enough attention to notice.

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When I ask what she would tell someone at the beginning of their own creative journey, she knows her response.

“Try not to judge yourself,” she says. “The internal judgment is a lot more severe than what you think other people are thinking when they look at your creations.”

She tells a story about flying from Naples to Sicily and sitting next to an American couple. She told them what she did, because they asked. They still follow her on Instagram. They still leave nice comments. They’ve bought jewelry. Not because she was trying to sell them something but because she didn’t minimize what she was doing.

“Not minimizing yourself means you can make some really nice connections,” she says. “We always have that fork in the road where we can decide to be honest or pretend it’s just this little thing I do on the side. It was never a little thing for me. It was always a big thing.”

She adds something more as we wrap up.

“Everybody’s creative,” she says. “The self-imposed pigeonholing we do as humans is very minimizing. I’ve just accessed mine. That’s the only difference. The accessing and allowing myself to go there.”

Her daughter, now eighteen months, is already showing her in the way that only very young children can, what creativity looks like in its purest form. Explorative, unselfconscious, not yet aware it could be anything other than exactly what it is.

Olivia watches her and remembers.

Speak soon,

Kelly

When I first came across El Quadrado, I assumed it was a community space before realizing it was also a store. The energy felt bigger than retail. Somewhere between a gallery, a salon, and the kind of place you wander into for a glass of wine and accidentally leave with a handwoven Bolivian top you’ll keep for years.

That ambiguity is intentional, and a clear reflection of the way Sofía Ortiz moves through the world. Instinct first, logistics later.

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Sofía grew up in Bolivia, the oldest child in a family with clear expectations. Her grandfather, her father, the careers they had built. The path was drawn before she arrived at it. She followed it the way you follow something you have not yet learned to question: all the way to a finance degree, a job at UBS in New York, a life that looked exactly like it was supposed to.

She lasted two years.

“I already know what it is to not be happy with what you do,” she says. “And it was not a way I wanted to live.”

Every day after work, she would leave the bank and run across the street to volunteer at a gallery. A visceral action rather than a strategic one. The feeling of being in that space, around art and objects and people who cared about them, was so different from everything else in her day that she could not ignore what it was telling her. When Covid arrived and the world paused alongside it, she used the stillness to make her decision. She applied to interior design programs, got into Parsons, turned it down when it moved online, and found a master’s program in Madrid instead. She moved there during a pandemic, a city where she had studied abroad and had liked well enough to trust.

Her mother, who had spent Sofía’s entire childhood telling her that whatever she wanted for herself, she could go after it, told her to go.

So she went.

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Her move to Madrid opened doors she hadn't anticipated, the way the riskiest decisions often do. During her master’s, she started noticing something at the edges of the European design world. Latin American artists and designers were gaining traction in Europe, but the infrastructure to bring them into the market properly, with context, care, and the right relationships, barely existed. Sofía became a natural bridge, her finance training coupled with a design sensibility that spent years on the sidelines. She began representing collectible design galleries from Latin America throughout Europe, placing pieces, building connections, learning the market from the inside.

She was good at it, but the energy kept pointing somewhere else. “I was pouring so much love and work into other people’s projects,” she says. “And I thought, if I’m going to work this hard, I want it to be for something that’s mine.”

So in November 2024, she started making calls. She did not have a space. She did not have a name. She did not have a branding agency. But when designers she admired asked if she had a location, she told them it was almost ready. The agency was finalizing the materials and she would send everything over soon. It was a beautiful lie, told in service of something she already knew was true.

“I kind of bullshitted my way in,” she says, laughing. “But I was in the same conversations as buyers from Moda Operandi. So I had to.”

By March she had signed a lease and by July she had opened the store. Three months to build out a space, source inventory across two continents, navigate international import rules for each country she was bringing product from, and learn an industry she had never actually worked in. On opening day, there was a large hole in the wall that wasn’t finished yet.

Nobody noticed.

“If you put yourself in a position where you have to be ready,” she says, “you will be ready. Because you have no other option.”

Her mother spent opening week helping hang the lights.

⚀

The name came on a holiday in Trancoso, Brazil. Every evening after the beach, everyone in town, young and old, locals and visitors, drifted toward the same place. The plaza at the center of the village where you could have a drink, buy a dress, run into someone you hadn’t seen in years, stay until one in the morning because nobody wanted to leave. The plaza was called El Quadrado. The Square. Sofía arrived home, wrote it down, and saved it for when the time came to package the feeling for Madrid.

Not a store or gallery specifically, but a place where things happen. Where people come back. Where the Norwegian student who wandered in one afternoon now brings every friend and family member who visits him in Madrid. Where events have quietly launched other people’s businesses. Where the Latin community in the city, and the international visitors passing through, find something that feels like a shared language.

The space reflects everything Sofía has been building toward. Iberian and Latin American designers whose work is sculptural rather than trend-driven, pieces that earn a second look because they don't resemble anything else. Among them, Heirlome, whose Laia Top is hand-crocheted by Madres y Artesanas Tex, a collective of artisan women based just an hour’s flight from where Sofía grew up. Weise, whose fluid, architectural silhouettes and natural fabrics feel like they were made for exactly this kind of room. Colombian designer Natalia Criado, whose tableware Sofía describes with the tone of someone who can't quite believe they exist.

Many of these brands are family-run. Husbands and wives. Mothers and daughters. While Sofía did not plan that, it happened because of who she is drawn to and what she is looking for: not just a beautiful object, but the hands behind it.

“Whenever you buy something from the store,” she says, “the best thing is that there's always a story behind it. So when people either stop you in the street and compliment you or they come to your home and see a beautiful centerpiece, there's a story to it.”

Perhaps most surprising to her was the consistent reaction to the Bolivian pieces. The craftsmanship, the materials, the techniques passed down through generations, they became less visible through familiarity. But watching people from across Europe and the Americas encounter those pieces for the first time and feel something has been one of the unexpected gifts of the whole project.

“We don’t truly appreciate what we have,” she says of her home country. “And then you watch someone else see it and you think, oh. Right.”

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Nine months in, El Quadrado is already becoming more than its walls. A Miami pop-up in February generated enough interest that a more permanent presence there is now on the table. An agency model, representing and connecting artists across disciplines, is something Sofía is actively developing. She always intended the name to hold more than one room.

When I asked what she would tell someone sitting with their own version of what she had felt, a restlessness, a creative pull, a life that doesn't quite fit, she answered, as usual, without pretense.

“I hate the feeling of regret,” she says. “I’d rather say I went for it and it didn’t work. I already know what the alternative feels like. I already know what it is to wake up not excited. And it’s not a way I wanted to live.”

Her father has a saying she has never forgotten. Lo bueno no es amigo de lo perfecto. What is good is not friends with perfect. She has built her life, and now her business, around that belief.

What Sofía has created is not just a store or a gallery or a community space, though it is all three. It is an argument for trusting your instincts before you fully know where they are taking you. For believing in the beauty of where you come from. For understanding that the most magnetic spaces, and the most magnetic people, are usually the ones who started before they were ready and figured it out on the way.

The hole in the wall gets fixed eventually. The store opens anyway.

Thank you for being here,

Kelly

And I was right to be frustrated but I was wrong about why. Algorithmic sameness isn't what happens when technology gets too good. It's what happens when people stop being specific enough about who they are and what they actually see. The copy-paste problem isn't a tool problem. It's a perspective problem.

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So this drop is a counter-argument. Not originality for its own sake. That's just novelty, and novelty is cheap. I mean work so shaped by individual experience that it could only have come from one person. Inspired, yes, but theirs.

Ariana Papademetropoulos

Water Based Treatment is a spiritual practice, though perhaps not on purpose. You lie inside an aquarium. Fish move past you. Music plays. That’s the whole thing, and it’s enough, because Papademetropoulos isn’t trying to make you think about reality so much as make you briefly stop trusting your sense of where it ends. Her installations aren’t asking questions. They’re making the unseen material, specific, and present enough to feel.

Raphaël Hay

The premise of *Humanity Gone* is almost too on-the-nose for this newsletter: an angel whose wings are stolen by a man who wanted them for himself, now forced to navigate a world that shows her exactly what it is. Hay didn't need an algorithm to tell him what the moment called for. He already had the story. The one about what gets taken from you when someone decides your perspective is more useful to them than it is to you. The film is visually stunning, yes, but the images earn that description by actually doing something. This is work that could not have been generated, because it came from a specific wound.

Fernanda Castro

What's interesting isn't that Rosalía and Charli XCX wear Fernanda Castro. It's that they came looking for her after she had already built the vocabulary entirely on her own terms: fetishwear sensibility met with couture construction, chiffon ribbons woven into structured panels, see-through shorts finished with pleated trim, corseted shirts that read simultaneously as armor and exposure. The famous people arrived later. The point of view was already there, fully formed, waiting for the culture to catch up.

The antidote to copy-paste culture isn’t more originality. It’s more specificity. These three didn't solve the problem of algorithmic sameness. They just made it irrelevant.

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Until next time,
Kelly

The other morning I asked my dad for a sign.

Since his passing, my sister and I have come to believe he visits in the form of hummingbirds. In some traditions, they carry blessings from those we’ve lost. I can’t fully trust in signs, but a large part of me will always hope that those we lose don’t leave forever. Less than thirty seconds after I asked, a hummingbird hovered outside my patio doors.

I’m no dad. But perhaps this will be your hummingbird.

⚀

When I was fifteen, my dad passed suddenly. I’ve now lived more years without him than with him, and still, I find myself wanting to call him almost every day. He was only 56. That number still makes me angry.

He was a passionate musician. A talented drummer, curious about any instrument he could get his hands on. But he didn’t pursue it. He chose stability instead. Built a successful business. Provided for his family in a way that gave me opportunities he never had.

I’ve spent a long time holding both of those things at once. The gratitude and the ache. The life he built for us and the life he set aside to build it. He gave me everything. And I’ve spent the beginning of my thirties wondering what he would have made, if he’d had more time.

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We’re all going to die someday. Most of us know this and promptly file it away.

It’s easier that way. The fear of suffering, of the unknown, of what gets left behind, is easier to manage from a distance. So we keep it there. Somewhere between the things we’ll deal with eventually and the things we’d rather not deal with at all.

But here’s what shifts when you stop looking away: it becomes the most clarifying fact of being alive.

A hundred million people have come before us. They are gone, and yet nothing around us is untouched by them. Every idea, every object, every tradition carries the fingerprint of someone who no longer exists. They shaped the world from the inside and then stepped out of it. What they left behind stayed.

We will do the same. The question is just what we’re leaving.

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For the last ten years I’ve built a life around stability. Safe roles. Strong companies. A career I’m genuinely grateful for. And still, a question keeps surfacing. What is all of this for? How long am I going to keep choosing it?

I built C’est Cool because I couldn’t stop thinking about the people who chose differently. Founders who walked away from the predictable path and built something that could only have come from them. I told myself I was doing it for them, to give underrepresented creatives a platform, to tell the stories that should be told. And that’s true.

But I was also doing it for myself. Gathering evidence. Watching to see if it was possible. If someone like me could step off the edge and build something that lasts.

My dad built his life so that I could have choices he didn’t. I think about that constantly. The weight of it and the gift of it. That the most loving thing he ever did was hand me time he never got to keep.

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You and I are not going to last. But what we create might.

Not because art is more noble than other work. But because it’s where individual perspective becomes something that can travel further than a single lifetime. What you noticed, felt, survived, loved, been confused by: translated into something someone else can hold, long after you’re gone.

My dad did this without ever calling it art. He shaped how I see the world in ways I’m still discovering. He is gone, and he is not gone. The people we love have a way of outlasting themselves, through everyone they touched, and everyone those people touch in turn.

That’s what making something does. It’s just a more deliberate version of the same thing.

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You don’t have to quit your job. You don’t have to call yourself a creative or a founder or an artist. You don’t have to have it figured out.

But it’s worth asking, deliberately and honestly: when it’s over, what do you want to have left? Not the title. Not the resume. The thing that carries something of you into the lives of people you’ll never meet.

Mortality is not a sentence. It’s the condition that makes the question urgent. That forces us, if we let it, to stop deferring and start deciding who we actually are and what we actually want to make of the time we have.

I don’t know for certain that hummingbirds carry messages from the people we’ve lost. But I know that what we make does. Put something into the world that could only have come from you, and it will reach people after you’re gone. Shift something in someone you’ll never meet.

That’s not optimism. That’s just how it works.

Make the thing. You won’t be gone forever.

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Speak soon,

Kelly

Mariana Ertmann needed a sandalwood comb. Not any comb, but one that felt right in her hand, carved from real wood, weighted properly, something that carried a sense of permanence. She looked everywhere and found nothing that met the standard she had in her head. So, naturally, she went to her father-in-law’s garage.

She brought with her a photograph of an antique comb, the kind that felt like it belonged on a vanity table in another era, and determination. What followed was an afternoon of sawdust and trial and revision, a drill and a saw and two people figuring it out together, until the shape in the photograph started to exist in the world.

That is how Borne works. Not from a trend, not from a market gap, but from a specific, unmet need that Mariana decided to solve herself. Down to the last detail.

“The more passionate and nerdy and obsessive with the little details you can be,” she says, “the more you’re able to understand and then translate it in a way that people will notice.”

The tassel on The Silk Comb is hand-knotted silk, made by women in a region of Thailand with a generations-long practice of working with the material. Mariana found them through her seamstress in Houston, who found them through a family member, who passed along a phone number. The tassel is attached by Mariana herself, for every single order. The box it arrives in took six months to get right.

This is what the brand is.

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Mariana grew up in Bogotá, studied design there, and moved to Houston by way of family connections and an interior design internship that turned into a full-time position. She spent years learning the industry from the inside, putting energy into other people’s visions, growing increasingly aware that she had one of her own.

The city she landed in was not exactly a natural fit. “Houston can feel closed off,” she says, with the warmth of someone who has made her peace with it. “But there’s a lot of room for opportunity. If I weren’t in Houston when I started my creative journey, I probably wouldn’t have gotten here.”

What Houston gave her, unexpectedly, was space. Space to go to estate sales on weekends and develop a quiet obsession with antique objects. Space to start noticing the difference between a polyester shirt and a cotton one, and to understand why it mattered. Space to take trips to New York and discover that the fashion world she had always found intimidating was actually populated by interesting people, some of whom were genuinely worth knowing, and some of whom were not quite as formidable as their Instagram suggested.

“You can’t compare yourself to others based on social media or based on what you hear from others,” she says. “You just have to experience life for yourself.”

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Borne launched in January 2025 with a clear point of view: that objects should be chosen slowly, kept long, and mean something. Under it live two distinct worlds. The Edit is the vintage curation side, an evolving selection of antique pieces that Mariana sources, photographs, and presents with the care of someone who truly values what she is looking at. The Atelier is where her original designs live, objects imagined to age with you, to work their way into your daily rituals, to become the kind of thing you reach for without thinking.

The vintage funded the designs. The designs gave the vintage a context. The brand became a universe rather than a store.

Her eye was trained over years of antique hunting, estate sales, and a deepening love for the Art Deco period specifically. “Art Deco is that perfect transition,” she says, “that still honors craftsmanship and quality while making it functional and timeless.” It sits between the ancient and the modern in a way that mirrors her own sensibility: a design school background in modernism, an obsessive personal interest in what came before it.

Each piece in the Atelier has a provenance worth knowing. The Spira Cuff begins in the Andes: a Colombian emerald sourced in partnership with the Alliance for Responsible Mining, prototyped in a Parisian atelier, and finished in New York’s Diamond District, where Mariana discovered her production partners were Colombian. Full circle, she says. The Silk Comb, carved locally in Houston and finished with the silk tassel made by women in Thailand. Packaging that took six months to get right: custom boxes lined in black velvet, revised and revised again until they matched what she had always envisioned.

“I am so happy that I did not settle,” she says. “The devil is in the details. And I hope people will see that the minute they receive a Borne box.”

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New work is already forming. A collaboration with Christina Grasso, the New York tastemaker known as The Pouf, began with a shared fascination and arrived as a first prototype the morning of this conversation: a gold-plated lighter case pendant, tasseled, designed to be worn as jewelry or used to light candlesticks, the kind of object that is beautiful before it is anything else. Mariana held it up to the camera and the craftsmanship was immediately legible.

Longer term, Borne is moving toward a collection that pairs each wearable piece with a decorative object counterpart, and eventually toward furniture, perhaps the refurbishing of antique pieces. She has already been doing this for herself. Her couch, she mentions, was in very bad shape when she found it.

When asked what she would tell someone just starting out, Mariana skips past the expected answers and lands on something more useful: do your accounting from the beginning. Set up QuickBooks. Save every expense. Be frugal where you can, because you will want those resources later and you will not be able to predict when. “As creatives, we forget about that side of the business completely,” she says. “We’re focused on visuals.”

The other thing she would say, with equal conviction: be smart about who you build your life with. “You need a supportive husband,” she says, laughing, then catching herself. “Or don’t marry, and you have all the time for yourself.”

And underneath both of those, something quieter. Give your obsessions respect. Follow your curiosity into whatever corner it takes you. The sandalwood comb, the Colombian emerald, the silk tassel from Thailand: none of those details exist without a person who took her own instincts seriously enough to follow them all the way down.

Borne is still in its early days. Still being reinvested in, still finding its people, still becoming what it is going to be. Mariana knows this and is not in a hurry. She wakes up, walks her dog, reads Wuthering Heights. She dreams big and tries to stay present. She writes a handwritten note with every order, knowing that one day there will be too many to do that.

She is in no rush to get there. But she is getting there.

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Thank you for being here,

Kelly

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It’s that joy I remember clearly, and also somehow forgot to bring with me. So when I started stumbling upon these designers and creatives, I felt something close to genuine gratitude. Reintroduced to a version of myself that knew getting dressed, and seeing the world, could just be fun.

Florentina Leitner

The first question I asked myself when I found her: who is she? Immediate interest, immediate curiosity. Her pieces feel like a reconnection to childhood, but through the lens of the cool older girl I imagined when I was younger. There’s a softness, a femininity, and an ease of experimentation. The kind of creativity only a young girl knows, before it sometimes gets quietly taken from her.

An Austrian designer who used clothing as narrative long before launching her own brand, Leitner spent years designing womenswear for Dries Van Noten before going out on her own in 2021. It is a world I feel called back to. A future I am interested in inhabited.

Kasia Kucharska

Berlin-based Kasia Kucharska takes traditional craft and pulls it into new territory. Her garments are built around sustainable manufacturing techniques, which we love, but they are so much more than an eco-friendly label. They are one-of-a-kind pieces made by someone who knows how to have a good time. Forget traditional and trade it for natural latex.

Chrissie Abbott

The first time I saw Chrissie Abbott’s work, I didn’t have words for it. I still might not. Collaged, maximalist, and not scared. It pulls from early internet aesthetics, retro-futurism, and the kind of color only someone with genuine joy in their practice reaches for. It feels like stumbling into someone’s very specific, very vivid imagination. I discovered her through a recent collaboration with Hattie Stewart, and I haven’t looked away since. It just feels right.

August Barron

Obviously, August Barron. Fashion duo Bror August Vestbø and Benjamin Barron are the princesses of my modern world. Bror said it best in an interview with Dazed: “When you’re little and queer, you feel it immediately — the disconnect between who you want to be and who you’re supposed to be. I think that makes you sensitive to contradiction forever. Our clothes are about that — clothing that’s open to different experiences in a way.”

Somehow, that tells you everything.

May we all find our way back to the things that made us feel most like ourselves.

Speak soon,
Kelly

One has been celebrated, elevated, applauded. The other, expected. Duties done, yet treated as part of the job description rather than anything to be triumphed.

I don’t have to assign either story to a gender. It’s a dynamic so woven into the fabric of society that you already know exactly what I mean. The man leads. The woman supports.

In that arrangement, femininity was reduced to something delicate. Decorative. Passive. As if softness exists in opposition to power, rather than as one of its most complex forms.

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If you look at history, it’s easy to see how deeply that narrative intertwined itself within society. Women positioned as caretakers, bodies, and extensions of someone else’s life rather than the architects of their own.

We couldn’t vote, open a bank account, or move freely through the world without being tethered to a man in some way. We are the first real generation of women living in a world where it’s acceptable to demand equality.

And yet, growing up, the world asked of us, quietly and consistently, to be less feminine. The highest compliment a girl could receive was that she wasn’t like other girls. Chill. Easygoing. A guys’ girl. The one who didn’t make things complicated.

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I spent most of adolescence trying to be that. Downplaying the things that were naturally and genuinely me, because the culture around me had made it clear they didn’t matter. Looking back, it felt less like growing up and more like a slow departure from myself. As if the destination was somewhere closer to male. Because male was where the credibility and relevance lived.

This was less a personal experience, and more a logical conclusion of a world designed to make us feel that way. But recognizing it is where everything changes.

Softness was supposed to be our weakness. The quality that made us easy to overlook, to manage, to redirect into domestic purpose. Softness was a liability. The reason we needed protection, guidance, a structure built by harder hands.

But softness is more than fragility. It is the capacity to hold contradiction, to be simultaneously strong and gentle, serious and light, ambitious and present. It is emotional intelligence, which turns out to be intelligence. Full stop. The ability to listen without losing yourself, to build community without demanding hierarchy, to create something and allow it to be seen, touched, and changed by others.

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Women have always been doing the real work of civilization. We raised the children who became the leaders. We held the social fabric together, subtly, consistently, without recognition.

Long before we were allowed into institutions, we were the institutions. Informal, uncredited, essential.

And now we are also in the room. Building businesses, questioning culture, shaping brands and products and creative practices that bear our point of view. The results, messy and incomplete and still far from equal, are already undeniable.

Think of the qualities women bring. The refusal to separate feeling from strategy. The understanding that how people experience something matters as much as what it produces. The instinct to build community and not just category.

Qualities that represent the difference between something that merely functions and something that lasts.

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Some days it feels like women are holding up entire systems. The mental load, the emotional labor, the invisible coordination, all of it performed daily by women who are also building careers, ideas, lives of their own.

C’est Cool was never meant to be exclusively for women. But I find myself returning to them. To what they’re creating and putting into the world. Not necessarily more deserving of attention than what men are building, but more present to me right now. More urgent, somehow. Like something that has been waiting a long time to be properly seen.

Being a woman is the opposite of limitation. It’s a range most systems were never built to hold. The capacity to feel something fully and still function, to grieve and still show up, to be soft and still be formidable. The way we make things more beautiful, not as decoration but as philosophy, as a way of insisting that the world should be livable and not just productive.

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That is the power. And it’s our job to keep claiming it. So that when female-run businesses emerge, we get excited. And when our daughters grow up, it’s in a society that sees their inherent strength and capability. That they are celebrated, elevated, and applauded in the same ways we hope to see our sons.

The world has always been shaped by what women carry. It’s just finally starting to recognize it.

Speak soon,

Kelly

Here, a few things that caught my eye this week.

Ariana Goitía

Upcycled Curtains, by In House Blend

Shibori Pleats, by Julia Heuer

A Family Affair, by Amrit Singh

More next week.

Kelly

At night they adjusted the shape together. Should the cylinder be taller? Should the base widen slightly? Would the balance feel softer if the bowl opened more? There was no Shopify site, no roadmap for what it would become, only curiosity and the quiet stretch of time the pandemic had unexpectedly given them.

Today that lamp forms the foundation of Ceramicah, a design studio whose handmade lighting now lives in homes and projects around the world. But the story of the company is not simply about entrepreneurship. It is also about the experience of a woman in one of the first generations granted real permission to be many things at once, and the slow process of figuring out how those identities coexist in real life.

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Alex and Micah met in architecture school when they were nineteen and twenty. Their relationship unfolded alongside the early stages of adulthood, a decade spent building careers, moving cities, and gradually shaping the lives they wanted. “We’ve basically spent our entire twenties together,” Alex says. “Which also means we’ve watched each other change completely.”

Architecture had always been part of Alex’s orbit. Her father and grandfather were architects, and for a long time the profession felt less like a choice than a continuation of family history. Yet even as she studied it, she knew she did not want to inherit that path exactly as it had been handed to her. “I remember thinking, I don’t want to take over your company,” she says. “I want to build something that’s mine.”

After graduating she moved to Los Angeles and began working in interior design, eventually launching her own firm. Micah moved toward real estate development, drawn to the broader world of buildings rather than the practice of designing them. Both careers allowed for creativity in their own ways, but ceramics had always lived somewhere deeper for him. In high school he took ceramics class five different times, eventually convincing his parents to buy him a kiln off Craigslist. Like many early creative instincts, it had simply been filed away as impractical.

When the pandemic arrived, the rhythm of their professional lives shifted almost overnight. Real estate slowed dramatically, while Alex’s interior design business suddenly accelerated as people began rethinking their homes. For the first time in years Micah found himself with something rare: time without expectation.

He returned to clay almost instinctively. At first the pieces were simple vessels, bowls and vases that allowed him to rediscover the tactile process of shaping something by hand. Eventually curiosity led him toward something more complicated. He began experimenting with lamps, ordering electrical components online and reverse engineering other fixtures to understand their structure.

Alex watched the process through the lens of a designer accustomed to thinking about proportion and atmosphere within a room. “He operates from this deep curiosity about how things work,” she says. “And I operate from curiosity about how things feel.” The combination created a quiet dynamic between them, one focused on mechanics and the other on experience.

By 2021 Alex had reached a point of exhaustion with her interior design firm. After years of juggling clients and projects, she stepped away from taking on new work just as the lamps Micah had been making began attracting attention online. At the time Ceramicah barely existed as a formal company. The website had no checkout functionality, and customers discovered the pieces through Instagram before sending direct messages asking if one was available.

Orders were invoiced manually. Their living room slowly transformed into a shipping station while the second bedroom became a makeshift workshop. Clay dust found its way onto nearly every surface of the apartment, and they kept track of orders on a handwritten list marked with Roman numerals. “We were just winging it,” Alex says now. “I think people feel like they need everything perfect before they start. But you don’t. You just need enough proof that someone cares.”

The moment the business began to feel real arrived through a Los Angeles design showroom called Lawson-Fenning. The introduction came through Alex’s network from her years working in interior design, a career she had only recently stepped away from as Ceramicah began to take shape. Through a chain of mutual connections, the showroom discovered the lamps and decided to carry them. For a studio still in it’s early stages, the exposure was significant.

In hindsight, the moment feels less like coincidence and more like continuity. The relationships Alex had spent years building in one creative world quietly resurfaced to support another.

The partnership also clarified something Alex had understood instinctively from the beginning: positioning matters. Handmade ceramics often live in craft marketplaces or niche online shops. Ceramicah entered the design world through the front door, presented less as pottery and more as sculptural lighting.

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Ceramicah was never only a product experiment. From the beginning, it was also a partnership between two people learning how to build something together while sharing a life.

Working with your spouse can sound romantic from the outside, but in practice, it asks for an unusual level of clarity. The lines between work and life blur quickly, especially in the early stages of a business where everything feels urgent and personal at the same time.

In the first years of Ceramicah, Alex and Micah were doing almost everything themselves. Production, packing orders, managing sales, answering customer messages. Conversations that once revolved around dinner plans often drifted naturally toward kilns, inventory, and shipping schedules.

Rather than letting those boundaries dissolve indefinitely, they made a decision early on that would shape both the company and their relationship. They began working with a therapist, not because something had gone wrong, but because they understood how much communication a partnership like this requires.

Through that process they gradually defined their roles more clearly. Micah focused on production and product development, while Alex stepped fully into operations, branding, marketing, and sales. The structure gave the company stability and allowed each of them to lean into their natural strengths.

“You have to protect the relationship first,” Alex says. “Otherwise the business can swallow everything.”

As the company stabilized, Alex found herself confronting another realization. The business, no matter how fulfilling, could never be the only outlet for her creativity. Ceramicah paid the bills and allowed her to build something meaningful alongside the person she loved, but she still felt drawn toward other forms of expression, including music and writing.

For a long time she resisted that instinct, unsure whether wanting more creative outlets meant she was somehow ungrateful for the success of the company itself. Eventually she stopped fighting it. “I would come back from a music session feeling like I was floating,” she says. “And I realized I needed that in my life.”

What Alex began to recognize is something many women quietly carry. They grow up hearing they can be many things at once, yet still feel an unspoken pressure to place everyone else’s needs ahead of their own. Careers grow, businesses demand attention, relationships deepen, and somewhere along the way the creative instincts that once felt essential begin to drift to the edges.

Returning to music reminded her that creativity was never optional. It was a form of clarity, a space that allowed her to reconnect with herself outside the roles she played for other people. The time spent there was not a distraction from the work of building a company. In many ways, it made the work possible.

For Alex, the answer has not been choosing one identity over another, but learning how to let them coexist.

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Six years after its beginnings in their apartment, Ceramicah remains intentionally small. The team consists of four people, and each piece is still produced by hand in Los Angeles. Their original Tera Lamp remains the heart of the brand, though Alex and Micah are currently preparing to unveil a new product line this spring.

“It feels like the sophomore album,” she says, laughing.

The studio will continue to evolve over time, expanding into new objects and collaborations. But growth, at least for them, has never been the goal on its own. What matters more is preserving the conditions that made the company possible in the first place: curiosity, creativity, and the freedom to keep experimenting.

In a culture obsessed with speed and scale, Ceramicah moves differently. The work unfolds slowly, shaped by hand and expanded only as much as the life around it allows. When Alex reflects on the path that brought them here, the lesson she returns to most often is trust.

“When you trust yourself,” she says, “you can also trust your timing.”

Perhaps that is the true model her story offers. Success does not have to collapse a woman into a single identity. Sometimes it becomes one part of a much larger life, built carefully alongside the other selves she refuses to leave behind.

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Thank you for being here.

Kelly

Imitation has become second nature. Ideas circulate quickly, get reworked, and reappear in slightly altered forms. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it rarely holds the same weight. The work that stays with you usually comes from a different place. It feels considered from the beginning. As if it couldn’t have been made by anyone else.

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This week’s drop is a reflection of that. Women whose work carries a clarity that goes beyond aesthetics and into something more personal.

Milla Tombroff

I discovered Milla Tombroff through this silver piece designed to hold cigarettes and matches. It stopped me in my tracks. Covered in stones, texture, and detail, it feels like it’d have the capability to overwhelm, but instead it draws you in. The more you look, the more you see. I feel this way about all of her pieces. A Brussels-based jeweler by trade, Milla makes handcrafted heirlooms built to withstand trend, as the most interesting objects always do.

Zeynep Satik

Furniture is like clothing for your home. It should be just as considered, not just in how it looks, but in how it holds a space. That’s what draws me to Zeynep Satik’s work at Animate Objects. Her pieces don’t disappear into a room. A chair with a floral back that leans surreal. Tables with legs that feel carved instead of constructed. There’s a clear pull from modern art. The Runa Chair below references Max Ernst’s The Couple in Lace. Function is there but not as the reason you look. Each piece carries a presence. Something you place in a room not to fill it, but to define it.

Jada Veerle

I was drawn to this particular piece by the artist, Jada Veerle, based in East London. A work that is intense in a way that’s hard to look away from. The bodies feel warped and crowded together, like everything is happening too close. She describes this piece as coming from her poetry about watching people she loves struggle with addiction. You don’t need to know that to feel it, but once you do, it lands harder.

Zoe Mohm

Based in Paris, as all great creatives seem to be, Zoé’s work takes the chunky silver cool girl and makes her a little stranger. Her pieces feel messy and beautiful and imperfect. Almost like they’re living. There’s not a single piece that isn’t capable of holding your attention. An visual experience that can only be shaped by human hands.

Julia Fernandez

I discovered Julia Fernandez through this animated ceramic stool and immediately became drawn to everything else. Her work gives a sense of movement to objects that typically feel static. Ceramics that act as sculpture and animation, never fully one or the other. She moves across disciplines seamlessly, taking something traditional and making it feel entirely new.

It’s a privilege to spend time with work like this. To look closely, to write about it, and to share it with you. If we’re responsible for anything, it’s staying open enough to be inspired and generous enough to pass that on.

These artists are doing exactly that.

- Kelly

“Be confident in the depth of your curiosity, not the depth of your knowledge.”

It’s a funny human conflict. We all know that no one really knows what they’re doing, and yet at the same time, everyone wants to be right. The ego tells us that the more we know, the better we are. And the more we can prove it, the more valuable we become.

I’ve been thinking about what happens when you turn that on its head.

I read this quote months ago and keep coming back to it, usually in moments when I feel frustrated with the people around me. My instinct, more often than I’d like to admit, is to assume I’m right. That my answer and my way of doing things is the correct one. That if everyone else could just get on my page, we’d be better off. I can catch it now and course correct, but it’s still there. And it narrows things.

A great deal of our lives is spent in collaboration and in proximity to other people’s minds. We learn from each other, build together, and grow alongside each other. But the moment it becomes my way or the highway, the exchange ends. You stop listening and start waiting.

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I’ve always wanted to know everything. And more than that, I’ve been scared of what it means when I don’t. There’s a kind of grace in that uncertainty that I’m only now starting to understand.

For a long time, I filled the space with answers, opinions, and certainty. It’s exhausting. It feels like constantly trying to stay one step ahead of the moment you’re exposed for not knowing. And in doing that, I missed out on something better.

The conversations that flow. The ones where you ask one more question instead of offering a conclusion. Where your perspective shifts mid-sentence because you’re paying attention. Where ideas form that no one could have arrived at alone.

That only happens when no one is trying to win.

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The people I’m most drawn to now aren’t the ones with the fastest answers. They’re the ones paying attention. The ones who ask questions that slightly disarm you, or make you rethink something you thought you understood. The ones who are comfortable not immediately knowing.

I felt this most clearly from the most successful person I know. The CEO of a multi-billion dollar company and arguably one of the most powerful people in his industry. Not the path we’re building at C’est Cool, but undeniably a version of success.

You’d assume he got there by being the smartest person in the room. But that’s not what I’ve seen. I believe it’s because of his curiosity.

He doesn’t rush to insert his opinion or prove his intelligence. He asks questions. He leans on people who know more than he does. He builds through them. When he does speak, it’s because he actually has something he cares to say. Not because he feels the need to fill space.

There’s a level of confidence in that that feels entirely different.

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That’s the shift I keep coming back to. Not trying to be the one with the answer, but becoming someone who knows how to stay in the question a little longer.

Letting a conversation breathe instead of steering it. Asking one more question before offering a point of view. Being willing to say “I don’t know” without rushing to cover it. Trusting that something better tends to come from that place.

I think that’s also part of what we’re building with C’est Cool. Not a space where people perform what they know, but one where curiosity has room to lead. Where taste is shaped through exploration over expertise.

The most interesting work, the kind that actually moves culture forward, rarely comes from someone trying to prove they’re right. It comes from someone willing to follow a question a little further than everyone else.

And if we are all really connected, curiosity changes how we meet each other. And ourselves.

What’s driving your curiosity? What questions are you sitting on?

<3 Kelly

I love what a good outfit does to you. The way it shifts your mood. The way it sharpens how you see yourself. Sometimes even how you move through the world. There’s a certain kind of outfit that makes you feel like the best version of you, even if nothing else has changed.

And that’s the point. Clothes aren’t responsible for who you are. They’re responsible for transporting you.

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Designers create the pieces, yes. But stylists are the ones who bring them to life. They sit across collections, across aesthetics, across worlds, and piece things together in a way that feels entirely their own. Often, they’re the ones responsible for the look.

Personal style is one of the most enjoyable forms of self-expression we have. A space to experiment. To try something on without overthinking it. To play.

And for me, looking to stylists is one of the easiest ways to find that inspiration. The ones I’m drawn to make getting dressed feel exciting again.

Jamie-Maree Shipton

She’s everything I imagine my alter ego to be. Zero rules. Tons of play. Unexpected combinations that somehow just work. Sometimes colorful, sometimes worn-in, always interesting.

I discovered her through Julie Kegels, one of my favorite designers right now, and it made immediate sense. Her taste feels current in the only way that actually matters right now. There’s no overthinking it.

And that’s exactly why I love her.

Loïcka Grâce

No matter how much I try to pull myself into color, maximalism, experimentation…I always come back to monochrome. Clean lines. Texture. Pieces that feel like they belong to you, not the other way around.

Loïcka understands this instinct completely, but never lets it feel boring. Her work plays with texture, cutouts, and subtle drama in a way that keeps the eye engaged without overwhelming it. Effortless, but intentional.

She also recently launched a magazine titled Trust Issues. Parisian, of course. We love her.

Ann (@aaanettes)

I discovered her through what might be the best outfit dumps I’ve seen on Instagram.

Not maximalist, but definitely not minimal. Just a great time. The kind of dressing that feels expressive without trying too hard to be. Her looks are everything I wish I could wear more often. The kind of outfits your younger self would have been obsessed with.

She understands how to use color and contrast in a way that feels almost like composition. My fashion girls will get it.

Georgina Downe

And just like that, we’re back to beige.

But not basic beige. Think 18th-century sculpture beige. The kind that feels studied. Like it took time to arrive there. Her work sits somewhere between masculine tailoring and quiet sexiness. Structured, clean, but still undeniably feminine. Think Magda Butrym, Acne Studios, Camilla and Marc.

It’s all very considered. And very good.

Tell me who we should be watching next. I’m always chasing the next great eye.

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Speak soon,
Kelly

Georgiana Stegaru, the founder behind the Bucharest-based label, describes it as the moment she felt most proud. It makes sense. The gallery wall is a more honest frame for what CraXittude actually is.

What began as a personal design problem evolved, quietly and deliberately, into a fully formed creative vision. Georgiana wanted clothing she couldn’t find anywhere else. Natural fabrics that felt good against skin. Pieces that inspired individuality and creativity. Shapes that were architectural and fluid, structured and alive. Something with an edge that the market, at least the market available to her in Bucharest, simply wasn’t offering.

“I’ve never been interested in the fashion system,” she says. “My work started and exists outside it.”

So she built her own.

By training she is an engineer. By profession she is a product manager at Microsoft. These are not separate facts from the work she makes. Her technical thinking shapes the geometry of CraXittude’s silhouettes directly: the structural precision of the Monolith coat, the calculated draping of the Sierra dress, the deconstructed logic running through her collections. Engineering and design, in her hands, turn out to be the same conversation.

Growing up, Georgiana passed through phases that most people keep separate. There was the girl who admired runway shows. Then the teenager who rejected fashion entirely, drawn instead toward rock music and anything that defied the mainstream. That sensibility never left. You can see it in the work: something gothic in the foundations, even when the surface is clean and minimal.

She taught herself to sew and draw patterns, then let the process take over from there. Unlike conventional designers who begin with sketches, Georgiana starts directly with the material. Flat fabric becomes three-dimensional through folding, tension, and structural exploration. A rectangular block folded one way becomes trousers. Pulled at a corner, it becomes a blouse. Scraps from one piece inspire the next, becoming vests, jackets, studies in what a material can do when nothing is wasted.

“Sometimes I start with an idea,” she says, “and while playing with the fabrics, I get another one and it becomes something new.”

This is how CraXittude’s pieces tend to be made. Not designed in the conventional sense, but discovered.

The label began in 2017, with Georgiana participating in local fairs, testing whether her vision resonated beyond her own wardrobe. It did. Interest built gradually: friends first, then strangers, then international boutiques. Today, made-to-order pieces ship to customers across Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan, each one purchased with the deliberateness that the work invites.

The brand has grown alongside a full-time career and a growing family, not despite them. That independence from commercial pressure is, in many ways, what keeps CraXittude’s creative integrity intact. There is no obligation to chase trends, produce seasonally, or design for mass appeal. The work can remain exactly what it is.

Georgiana is quick to credit her technical background for more than just the shapes. Running a brand, she says, requires the same clarity as managing a product: know who you are designing for, and think about the business early. "If you are not thinking of the end customer," she says, "you can lose the opportunity to build something sustainable."

The materials are sourced with the same intentionality as the designs. The label works primarily with natural fibers: cotton and linen from artisans and suppliers like deFlorian in Romania, Noteboom Textiles in the Netherlands, and FabricSight in Spain. Alternative natural materials appear frequently. Piñatex, a leather-like textile made from pineapple fibers, is used in accessories, while experimental samples made from seaweed hint at future developments.

“I’m always curious when I see new innovative materials,” she says. “It opens possibilities.”

She is working toward B Corp certification, researching how to build circularity into the brand so that pieces can be returned, reworked, or responsibly retired. This is not a marketing position. It is the natural extension of a belief that was already oriented this way before the brand existed.

“My lifestyle takes into account my impact and my family’s impact on the environment,” she says. “This was on my mind from the [beginning].”

It shapes the names too. Pieces from her collections have names that feel like small poems: Steinfall, structured and asymmetric. Katachi, flowing geometry. Nordlith, deconstructed.

The brand’s tagline, “ethical avantgarde non-fashion,” is both a description and a refusal. A refusal of trends, waste, and the idea that sustainability has to look a certain way. CraXittude’s clothes are precise, unusual, and made to last.

They are not trying to be liked by everyone. They are trying to find the people who understand them.

So far, those people keep appearing.

À bientôt,

Kelly

That number tells you something. So do the names.

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Previous semi-finalists include Jacquemus, Simone Rocha, Grace Wales Bonner, Virgil Abloh, Demna Gvasalia, Ludovic De Saint Sernin, Rachel Scott, and Tolu Coker. The prize does not need you to be convinced of its credibility. What I want to do is make sure the six women in this cohort get the particular attention they deserve.

Iamisigo by Bubu Ogisi

A new fan of Ogisi, I was transformed by her November showing at Lagos Fashion Week. Operating across Africa, Iamisigo is much more than a conventional fashion brand. It is a contemporary wearable art practice, treating the human body as a canvas for expression, meaning, and art.

Each piece is made by hand in close collaboration with artisans across Africa, combining recycled materials, ancestral craftsmanship, and experimental approaches to construction. The result is something mesmerizing and deeply alive.

Colleen Allen

New York-based and previously nominated for the CFDA Prize, Colleen Allen has built a practice around a figure rarely centered in fashion with this kind of rigor: the witch. Not as aesthetic, but as archetype. A symbol we cannot help but love and understand.

Her collections read as rituals of transformation. Femininity without restriction, grounded in ease and movement. Charli XCX wore her to her wedding reception. Rama Duwaji chose her for the iconic shoot by Szilveszter Makó for The Cut. She describes her work as a search for her own feminine embodiment, and you can feel that searching draped and structured in every silhouette.

Golshaah by Golnar Ahmadian

Iranian-Canadian and based in Toronto, Golnar Ahmadian brings her architectural eye to fashion. Her brand, Golshaah, is sculpted, layered, and precise. The work of someone who thinks in structures and then deliberately disrupts them.

The commitment to thoughtfulness runs across everything she touches. There is a quiet rebellion important to her work. Tension between structure and freedom that never fully resolves and is better for it.

Julie Kegels

Based in Antwerp, Julie Kegels designs from feeling. Her collections are built around the identity of a woman — not a particular woman, but the complexity of womanhood as a state of being.

She likes to characterize her work as strange, but she means it in the best possible way. Rooted in craft, in intuition, in careful study. She has spoken about wanting to make something imperfect. And in that imperfection, something far more honest than polish.

MAZ by Manuela Alvarez

Colombian designer Manuela Alvarez works at the intersection of architectural design and material research. A single piece constructed with 20,000 glass beads. Another crafted with structural spikes knitted via hand-operated machine.

Her brand, Maz, collaborates with artisans across Latin America to develop original handcrafted textiles, with every piece being fully traceable. The team is made mostly of women, alongside indigenous and traditional artisans across Colombia.

This is slow fashion practiced at a depth most brands only gesture toward. Her 2025 collaboration with Adidas brought that ethos to a wider audience without diluting it. What she is building feels less like a brand and more like an ecosystem.

Petra Fagerström

We have spoken about Petra before and we’ll speak of her again.

The Swedish-born, London-based Central Saint Martins graduate defines her brand through the woman she designs for. Contemporary womanhood through dress. Her signature lenticular pleating integrates digital precision with the handmade — a tension she navigates with unusual grace.

Her work comes from places and things that frustrate her. She has described her role as one of respect and service toward women, portrayed through dignity. And perhaps most memorably: the woman who wears fashion determines where culture moves.

She is paying very close attention to that woman. So are we.

Three of these twenty designers will be selected. Whoever wins, these six names are worth holding onto regardless of the outcome.

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They are already building something worth watching.

Speak soon,
Kelly