THE THE CHALLENGE:: Create the brand identity for the Sophia 33 fashion brand. Focused on handmade clothing items, Sophia 33 needed a contrasting and bold visual identity that could fit a courageous vision for a small designer house.

THE CONTEXT: Sophia is a young Romanian designer who manufactures one-of-a-kind organic wool clothes, handmade and with a powerful traditional background. She was unsatisfied with her brand image, and wanted a rebranding process. I was given a creative carte blanche. 

THE CONCEPT: Since I felt Sophia is a very complex designer using multiple folkloric references in her creative approach, I decided to invent a mythological character (half ram/half wolf), inspired by the bicephalous creatures of Zoologia Fantastica.

I set four keywords as my aesthetic guidelines in the branding process: FEMININE, INTRIGUING, ROYAL AND ANTITHETIC. My biggest challenge was though turning all of this into a brand, closer to a designer house but keeping clear of the current cliches of the fashion world. The idea was to create a brand with a strong Romanian identity, that could become relevant for the international fashion market.

The logo was inspired by a mythological character, the famous Dr. Seuss's push-me-pull-me, so I combined two engravings representing a predator and a prey. The passive sheep and the active wolf, in full contrast, in full opposition, blended in a new hybrid creature called The-Wolf-In-The-Wool. The narrative concept behind the logo ideation, became naturally the brand slogan and the fundamental idea of the communication campaign of Sophia's first collection.

For the communication campaign of Sophia's collection, I developed a concept based on the antithesis of sheep vs wolf, wool vs latex, industrial vs rural, mass production vs handmade. Opposites attract and I wanted to take this further in a tactile sense. 

The model had to be featureless, covered by a latex mask, a faceless queen expressed herself in her own pastoral world, a stage in a stage setup that told more than one story at a time.