The RAYA Collection started looking at my thesis collection inspired by sailing, the Mediterranean Sea and its culture. My first idea was to create a continuation of that story but in this case for Fall/Winter. When pulling new inspiration I started to see images of beach huts with snow, lighthouses immerse in dense fogs and empty beaches. Those pictures not only gave me a first idea of the mood but also made me look at the beach in a different way where especially the beach huts became the protagonists. I was very inspired by their construction with the wood creating stripes. At this point I thought that this collection should be different that the previous ones and that could be possible only by avoiding embroidery and focusing only in stripes. 

What first started as a continuation of a nautical collection evolved into a deep exploration of the idea of stripes. This made me look at stripes in the natural world (the sea) but also how stripes where used in fashion (usually in a very graphic way). Starting with more simple composition of stripes the idea was to give them more complexity by modifying the direction and also the thickness. This is when I started looking at marbling which to me was a great reflection of the idea of a complex stripe. I also started to collage striped pictures to create other complex compositions and this was the point where I started sketching.

For this collection I wanted to concentrate a lot on sketching and try different systems to create a collection by only drawing on paper. The first stage was very automatic but when those first sketches were collaged I was able to start looking at different layers of clothing. Those layers were all printed in stripes and that’s why I kept introducing knit ideas. Knit fabrics allowed me not only to create stripe patterns but also modify the construction from simple stripes to more complex configurations.
Besides knits I also wanted to include the use of fur since was something pretty new to me. The challenge here was to apply this fur on the different layers to create a cohesive collection. The last stage of the collection after lots of sketches was to market the different pieces and style them into looks.

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