INTERVIEW WITH OU NON'S FOUNDERS, BRAND AT ITS FIRST COLLECTION

Ottavia Vianson and Nicola Voltolini. She is an illustrator and responsible for creating unique prints. He is a designer, the person who creates the silhouette. Together they are two creative young people who have founded this year Ou Non, a fashion brand made in Italy. The first collection thought for next summer and to tell it are the two founders who in this interview explain how the brand was born and the goals for the future.

Ottavia, Nicola, when and why did you decide to combine your styling skills and create Ou Non?

NV: We knew each other since school, and for a long time we thought we were giving away a personal project that expressed who we are and our point of view. We come from two very different cultural extras and have tastes and ideas against the antipodes. These details seemed perfect for us to realize our idea: one compensates for the other. Everything was born out of a chat and we dropped it.

Why did you call your brand Ou Non, that is or not? To put it as an alternative to the current fashion scene or, as you just said, Nicola, comes from risking starting a reality like yours?

NV: We do not have any certainty, the name is a sort of question we want to put to the clients, but also to ourselves. So we think of being an alternative but without presumptions, we go on our way. It also recalls our names, but in a different way giving the sense of a brand where the personal look is very strong: we have sewn it on us.

Looking at your first collection, the shooting, you would say that you have a great time to conceive it. Is the cheerfulness and carefree one of the characteristic features of the brand that we will see in subsequent collections?

OV: Absolutely yes. We are two visionary people and we try to reconcile these somewhat paradoxical visions with the world of clothing that has its own rules. And that’s what stimulates us and is fun to us.

NV: This is a real artery of our project. We would like people to have fun looking at it, but not just from a ludic but also thoughtful point of view: it is not said that the coming seasons will express this feeling so explicitly, but it is possible that they make it from a more conceptual point of view, more sophisticated.

What are the other Ou Non values?

NV: Certainly femininity, we do not want to give up mainstream tendencies, we want to reflecting on important issues without interpreting them too seriously. The goal is to bring clothes back to what they are, or armor, but I’m well aware that we are not going to war: it also takes a bit of frivolity. We do not want to create a doctrine, and we have no extreme ideas to communicate, but we want to express what for us means this historic moment, as we did with our first collection: the goal was to represent an Italian summer, ours and through our eyes.

You produce through LATE, LATEWEAR’s laboratory: How did this collaboration come about?

OV: It was born a little by accident, through Facebook. After several attempts we managed to get to them, to Antonella who greeted us. We received many advice, especially from the commercial and production point of view. In any case, in the end, the final design and stylistic decision is ours, obviously. However finding a project like that today is not easy, and as soon as we found their social page we stopped for a moment and we realized it was the right way for a start up like ours.

What is the target you are addressing to?

NV: Our customers are aged between 25 and 35 years old, to be large, although actually seeing the collection may not seem like this. But here the game returns: a girl today, even though she has a family and a job as a young woman, does not mean she does not want to joke, smile and dare a bit but elegantly.

What is fashion for you?

NV: For us it should be a cultural event, behind which there is history, culture … An art form. Of the current we appreciate the contamination, and this is due to the sudden change of the creative directors, which I do not see with a negative eye. Today the problem of fashion is the absence of a subculture, and this for me, which I studied anthropology before devoting myself to fashion studies, is a negative one, I take a little absence here.

What are the projects for the future?

OV: We are a small reality that wants to express ourselves, without necessarily embarking within the fashion world, but trying to find inspiration outside, in other realities. It is a lasting working in progress. At the production level, we are currently working on the winter collection we will present next year.

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