Decisions to create my life around fashion and the creative field has always come from my imagination to make things possible. This has been the driving point in my life to make sure I do things to the best of my ability. Starting with something as just an idea and transforming it into something that stands out helps me express myself. From a very young age of 9 years old, I would be telling my parents, friends and teachers that I am going to be a fashion designer one day. It would stay with me forever and people have always associated me with fashion since then. I was famous for not just following trends in high school but in fact standing out to make others think ‘wow’. My interests have always been fashion, design and art. Designing means for me happiness, art means for me inspiration, drawing means for me mediation and fashion means for me a way of expression and communication. Throughout the years I found myself seeing beauty where most people don’t see it. My experiences in various fields in the past decade helped me to develop myself to an extremely disciplined, hard-working and dedicated person. My strengths today include extreme attention to details, creative thinking, perfectionism, professionalism, management and organisation and communication skills.
Business as unusual
For my graduate collection “Business as Unusual”, I drew inspiration from many different things that I combined. For me, fashion isn’t clear-cut. It’s not mathematical or scientific. It’s something driven by a cultural reference, a feeling, a state of mind. In times of uncertainty such as Covid-19, we ask questions and then look externally for answers. We try to define our purpose, our mission, and our values. We try to define the usual. When we talk about time, we talk about today, the past and the future. I focused on the now and asked myself, “How does business look now?” and my answer would be anything but usual. Not only have I been questioning the world for this collection, but I also put all my heart into creating the female version of a gentleman. I named my brand after my father’s name who was an elegant, classy and successful businessman in Europe, born just after the Second World War and who was dressed in a suit his entire life. He is my forever inspiration for everything in life, and I passionately worked in creating the female version of IOANNI. The IOANNI woman, who is smart, confident, independent, and strong.
Business as unusual
The IOANNI Fashion Film for Fall 2021 collection “Business as Unusual” has been the highlight of my graduate collection. Not only has it a sentimental value to me, it is also one of my greatest pieces of artwork I have personally ever created, and I am saying that because I achieved my goal of not only creating a visual video but also a feeling. Music and colours played a very relevant role to me. My main goal in this video was to make the audience feel the emptiness in the city and the change of business as usual. My extreme perfectionism made me visit the city several times to choose the exact locations for the video shoot. I choose those specific locations by taking my fabric swatches of the collection with me and matching them to walls and floors. I had a vision in my mind and with my imagination to make things possible, I have created this vision into reality.
