IN TRANSITION

Founder’s Letter by Julia Zwingenberg

I have always loved the periods in between seasons. Perhaps because they feel familiar to life itself — nothing really ends and begins at once. Things shift, return, evolve.
Summer into autumn has always been my favourite. After months of dressing for heat, clothes become part of the conversation again. Tailored trousers, jackets, knitwear. Different weights and textures. The possibility of a full look.

I have always been fascinated by personal style and the identity that evolves with us. We rarely become entirely different people. Certain things remain, others disappear and some return years later with a completely different meaning.

The same jacket can belong to several versions of ourselves. The way we wear it changes. What once felt formal becomes casual. Something masculine suddenly feels sensual. We combine things differently because we are different. Perhaps this is why I have never been particularly interested in the idea of a wardrobe that starts over again with every season. I prefer continuity. For me, getting dressed is one of the ways we negotiate who we are and who we are becoming. Not as costume, and not necessarily for the attention of others. It is a form of communication — with the outside world, but also with ourselves.

Colour, proportion, texture, the tension between something precise and something undone. All of it can express parts of us that are difficult to put into words. Personally, I am always drawn to something slightly off. A proportion that feels unexpected. A piece worn in a way it perhaps wasn't intended. Something precise next to something almost ordinary. I don't like a look to feel too resolved. There should be something that interrupts it — a small contradiction that makes it personal. For me, that is often where identity becomes visible. Life moves in circles. Seasons return. Circumstances change. We change with them. Yet certain things continue to feel instinctively ours.

This pleasure in form, fabric and putting things together shapes my work for ZWINGENBERG. I think about how a shoulder falls, how long a pair of trousers should be, how a fabric moves on the body. I love the clarity of menswear-inspired tailoring and the tension that comes with adding soft knitwear or something fluid and sensual. A blazer with a pair of joggers. A cashmere sweater draped over the shoulders and knotted at the front. When I design, I also imagine how a woman might eventually wear these pieces in a way I hadn't considered.

I want to build a wardrobe that moves with us through the many parts of our lives. Pieces we reach for again and again, that support our everyday lives and leave room for the different facets of our personalities. From day to night, from autumn walks to dinner parties. Familiar pieces we combine differently depending on the occasion and our mood, finding new ways to make them our own.

With these Founder’s Notes, I am beginning an ongoing exploration of that relationship between clothing and identity. Of the many ways we express ourselves through what we wear, and how we make clothes our own by living in them. I don't think personal style is something we eventually complete.

It grows with us.

And perhaps the most interesting wardrobes are not the ones that constantly become new, but the ones that tell the story of who we have been, who we are — and who we are still becoming.

Julia Zwingenberg