I really enjoy the making process, and I found that a lot of the people I went to school with really don’t. Not just enjoying designing, but I really enjoy working with my hands and doing all the little beading and fabric treatments. I almost treat the fabric like a canvas when I’m working with it at first. I really love making but I also love what comes after; as I’m making I’m already thinking about how do I want to shoot this? I take a lot of photos and I like to shoot them on my friends.

I really love aging the clothes and making them feel already a little worn. When I buy vintage clothes, I really love the feel of an already worn t-shirt, or jeans that are already nice and soft. Anything I make shouldn’t feel hard or rigid, so I wash a lot of my clothes and stain them and wash them again and dye them, so they feel like someone’s already touched them. There’s a lot of dyeing and a lot of beading and stuff, just to make things seem friendly and like there’s been some love put into it.

When I go back to Brazil every year, everything is changing so fast and my whole family is obsessed with Abercrombie and there’s all this stuff that I see around them that’s so beautiful that no one is noticing. Like, nobody pays any attention to (an older family friend of mine) and everyone was so shocked that I would like, choose to do a photoshoot with her and use her as a model.

Then everyone was like, ‘she’s so beautiful!’ I was also really inspired by her clothes so I did a trade with her. I bought her some new dresses and gave her a couple of things I made, and I took some of her really old and worn dresses and rags that she had had for like, forty years, fifty years to sort of study the stains and study the fabric, and even use some of her rags for pieces and stuff.

I’m trying to understand what I’m doing and why I even enjoy this so much, cause it’s really difficult. I just like doing what I do. I could do a lot of other things but it just so happened that I make clothes. It’s cool to see these things on people. People transform these things that we make; it’s no longer a static piece. It becomes a moving piece and anyone who wears it makes it so different- the people make the clothes. And the clothing is really meant to be consumed. It doesn’t really work if it’s not, I think.

I’m a pretty lighthearted person, so I sometimes wish everyone would take a breath. Just giggle a little bit, be a little more compassionate. If we were all just nicer to each other, didn’t care so much or didn’t think so hard. Let it go sometimes, relax, take a deep breath. Just love a lot!