Explain who you are and your experience so far.

 

I'm Emily. I've designed, made and studied clothing and visual culture for almost twenty years. I'm currently studying for a PhD focusing on depictions of historical fashion. My main research interests are how clothing has functioned as a political tool, particularly in relation to elite women.

 

I worked in design and styling teams for a range of businesses, from streetwear to fetish wear, throughout my twenties, and in that time, I created my own clothing brand selling latex clothing 'Shokushu Boutique', inspired by Japanese street style, Kpop and my own mixed Asian/white heritage.

 

So, explain why you're rebranding?

 

After I finished my Fashion Design undergrad in 2013, I ran Shokushu Boutique for over 10 years. Unsurprisingly, a core part of keeping that afloat was that it needed to turn a profit. Over time, rather than inspire innovation this just completely stunted my creativity. The more financial success there was, the more I found myself doing soul-crushing, repetitive work for wholesale orders. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for all the opportunities we were given because of this, but it wasn't sustainable and it wasn't great mental health-wise.

 

So, I shifted my focus to making sure that my day job took the lion's share of bringing home living expenses for a few years (post pandemic hasn't really been the ideal time for that). I tried to make it clear that the brand was going to operate differently and that I'd only be making pieces as a creative outlet, but a lot of clients really struggled to understand this so it felt like the right time to just start from scratch.

 

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Tell us about the new Brand

 

So, the concept is essentially, what if 'dress' or 'fashion' was Art?

It's not really an original concept, but it's one the British Fashion industry has drifted pretty far from in the last few decades. The rise of gen AI requires a rethink of how we view creative activities. AI will streamline things in a way that will mostly make humans obsolete on the commercial side of things, so we need pleasure, creativity and chaos. That's the Art bit. If it happens to serve an aesthetic purpose, great, but its primary goal is not to be functional. I'm not making clothes to wear to work, to the gym or even to a fetish event. I don't wanna be SHEIN and I don't want to make anything replicable and marketable. It's all got to be useless.

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So, to be clear, you don't sell anything anymore?

 

In short, no. Full transparency, of course I'm still going to sell offcuts and occasionally sample pieces.  If somebody wanted to buy something from me, I'd take that as a great compliment, but I'd want to know what they want to do with it.

 

It's so taboo to be in my generation and say you don't want your focus to be money. It is a very privileged position to be in to be able to make a statement like that. I have, and have always had, a day job alongside doing this because it has never been an option not to.

 

I'm continuing to pursue funding opportunities for artists, though alarmingly few exist if you take this stance in regards to clothing. I'm currently reliant on a bit of funding that comes from my Patreon and the little I can spare from my own savings to invest in this.

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How did you come up with the name?

 

A core difference between the new brand and Shokushu Boutique is that it's just going to be me. Shokushu boutique had quite a few people in the team over the years but that wasn't financially sustainable post-pandemic, especially if I want to keep people on fair wages. I'm very keen for collaborations but essentially from here onwards it'll be a product of my own labour and my own madness.

 

So, when I explained this to a friend of mine, she took out her scrabble tiles and started playing with variations of letters in my name. I still want a degree of privacy, so we thought an anagram could work well. We tried a few combinations and felt like 'E.Rivessa' had a nice ring to it.

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So, who are your inspirations for the new brand?

 

Grayson Perry, Gilbert and George. The remnants of the generations where working class people still had a hope in hell of being artists.

 

Also partial to a bit of Kandinsky...his colour palettes, his chaos.

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Any Fashion designers?

 

Iris Van Herpen. She gives no fucks about wearability.

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Anything else you want to add?

 

I know it can be such a bullshit greenwashing buzzword but it's entirely relevant to mention sustainability here. When I started thinking about how I’d pay for material under this new model I was pretty concerned. For years, I'd been conditioned to think that latex garments had to be sleek and pristine- pretty much the antithesis of what we tend to associate with reworking or second-hand garments. Somebody once joked that I could patchwork all my offcuts - I've acquired stacks of boxes of these over the years- mostly from wholesale orders. As soon as the concerns about sell-ability weren't in play I thought, why not?

 

 I won't pretend I've been perpetually driven by a selfless need to rescue the planet. Wasted material is wasted money. This is a little discussed issue though, because we're not often comfortable talking about latex clothing because of its association with the fetish industry. As a result, we're also not talking about its wasteful practices, which follow a pretty similar model to those of many luxury brands.

 

So yeah, sustainable practice and latex aren't mutually exclusive necessarily, IF you can move beyond that ‘need’ to have everything be pristine.