Rio Fashion Talks

Yamê Reis is a known personality of Rio de Janeiro's Fashion scene. The power woman, graduated in sociology has a long history in fashion, working as a fashion executive for renown brands such as Cantão, Totem and Le Lis Blanc, prizewinning costume designer working with dancer Deborah Colker and for Rede Globo, creator and director of Rio Ethical Fashion, the first international forum for sustainable fashion in Rio de Janeiro, founder of Moda Verde, a company that operates in the areas of education, creative direction and special projects for sustainable fashion and currently acting as fashion design coordinator at Instituto Europeo di design in Rio. In this episode we talked about her extensive experience, her thoughts and motivations and about fashion's true essence - change.

Fashion can be a controversial subject - frivolous, superficial on one hand, artistic, profound and political on the other. But what does the term fashion actually mean? What does it say about us and our societies? With Maya Marx, a specialist in the history and culture of fashion and the connections with art, we talked about her PhD in fine arts (dialogues between art and fashion) and the many relationships between fashion, society and culture.

One of the few Rio-based brands with a longer history, Wöllner was founded in 1983 when they started producing wallets made out of sails fabric. Today, although being particularly known for its backpacks, the menswear brand based in Rio de Janeiro incorporates a wide range of products, from casual- , to swim- and activewear, offering everything an active lifestyle requires. Together with CEO Giuliny Shauer we talked about the importance of knowing ones brand essence, what it means to get a brand back on the right path and about the numerous opportunities and challenges of the fashion industry's ever changing landscape.

In this episode I'm having a conversation with Isabela Bueno - an ambitious creative young woman living in Rio de Janeiro. Her work combines fashion, art and sustainability. By hand painting second hand clothes found in thrift shops, she transforms a used product into something unique and meaningful.

I've visited visual artist Katia Wille in her atelier in Ipanema to talk about her three lives, as she called it - her international career in the fashion industry as a corporate art director, the period as a creative director of her own brand and her current life as a visual artist.