Ethical fashion company, VOZ, has just unveiled their SS17 collection – combining traditional elements and modern flair for a timeless result.
On Elizabeth Street in NYC’s east village, sits the VOZ sanctuary. Just steps from the bustle of Bowery and Bleecker Street, the space is surprisingly peaceful. This is the home of ethical fashion company, VOZ, who just unveiled their newest line. The spring/summer collection combines traditional symbols and hand woven elements from Mapuche culture, along with modern, light and wearable fabrics.
Appropriate for spring day-to-night designs, this line mixes blushes, ivories, and silvers with plumb and black. Similarly, the highly structural meets the fresh and flowy in many of these pieces. The result is a fun and mature look that is both comfortable and elegant.
Jasmine Aarons, the founder and CEO of VOZ, took some time to talk with TheCelebrityCafe.com’s Erin Huestis about this line. She explained how the team approaches design from the ground up and what inspired this SS17 collection.
TheCelebrityCafe.com: Can you talk a little bit about the overall inspiration behind the direction you took in this line?
Jasmine Aarons: We were inspired by more romantic, painterly-type feminine Goddesses. So we took a look at John Singer-Sargent’s paintings. The concept of these billowing beautiful silhouettes in water or in the wind – and how that would move. So we were really fascinated with movement and the contrast between delicate silhouettes to the more loose and unstructured textiles. That was really where we focused for our SS17.
TCC: For people who aren’t familiar with VOZ in general yet, can you talk about where you source the fabrics from?
JA: We work to empower textile artisans through fashion design and collaboration. We do that be creating modern fashion pieces that are hand loomed on southern Chilean, Mapuche looms. We work primarily with Mapuche artisans, however we are open to expanding and layering different forms of collaborations on top of that. As you can see, the exquisite and also very unique handmade nature of our line is because we are vertically integrated in our design process. And we design all the way to our fabric texture together.
We really exist to give the weavers a safe space to not only practice their symbols, but exchange the knowledge of their symbols and their techniques and their heritage with the community. In addition to sharing artisan practices and sacred objects through these textiles with the international community at large.
TCC: When you say you design together – who is together in that?
JA: We designed this collection with Lauren Jones, who is my co-Design Director. And we had a guest designer, Nadine Trad, also worked with us on this collection, which was beautiful. And we function as a design team – a design collective – and we work with the weavers every design step of the way.
TCC: In the color pallet that you’re working with here, what drew you to these stark contrasts?
JA: Black is a sacred color in the Mapuche culture and it’s a common color in these textiles. We have gone to an extreme in this collection with the black and we wanted to balance it out with the lighter [tones].
TCC: I would like to wrap back to the symbols… Why specifically these two?
JA: Each one is really important to the weaver’s tradition. For example, the Wangülen is the star from where the Goddess was born. The Lalén, the spider, is the embodiment of the weaver and the weaving Goddess. We don’t choose the symbols for the weavers. We ask them ‘What symbols are representative of your community and your time and your preference and your taste?’ So every season the weavers actually bring the symbol to the designs. And then maybe we’ll work with the placement so that it fits the pattern… but really, it’s up to the weavers, the symbols that we feature. It’s their symbolic identity and their cultural history and we handle with care. I mean, we exist to provide a platform and literal shapes for it.
TCC: Can you touch on the connection between the design elements you chose and the overall mission?
JA: A lot of it is listening to the material, listening to the culture, listening to the people. What works on their looms? What’s the constraint of that loom? And then how can we incorporate that into clothes that are beautiful and elegant. And then how can we compliment the hand woven textiles with pieces that are more liquid and more delicate and drape in a certain way. How can we contrast the structural element of the loom textiles with the complimentary collection pieces? That’s how we think about it. It’s very intuitive.
VOZ SS17 is available at the VOZ Sanctuary, 296 Elizabeth Street, in addition to stores throughout the United States and Europe.