Amapô Spring/Summer 2014

Founded in 2004 by designers Carolina Gold and Pitty Taliani, Amapô is one of the few Brazilian fashion labels that celebrate avant-garde street style in its cosmopolitan sense and as it is better understood by style-savvy fashion consumers in metropolises such as Tokyo or London. Gold and Taliani’s approach to fashion is clearly a post-modern one, where processes such as deconstructed tailoring, the combination of different materials and colours, or asymmetric layering of fabrics are intrinsic manifestations of fashion by the mere fact that they stem from a consciously ironic anti-fashion standpoint.

Based on the challenging viewpoint that whatever a fashion designer touches has the potential to become (by the process of conceptual interpretation) a fashion product, Amapô’s menswear and womenswear collection for Spring/Summer 2014 attempted to translate (not entirely successfully to all people) the themes that served as inspiration, namely the fantastical world of mermaids, pirates and seascapes. In its heterogeneous display of boxy shapes, oversized shirts, shorts over pants, asymmetric dress lines, juxtaposed wide horizontal and vertical stripes, polka dots, fringes, abstract prints and ruffles, the collection was anchored by a purposeful eclecticism that, although not to everyone’s taste, certainly had a captivating quality.