OMUT: How to open an unusual brand of jewelry in Russia
Designer Nastya Klimova works at the junction traditional crafts and modern art, creating jewelry and accessories from metal chains, sometimes weightless, sometimes almost monumental. Over the past few seasons, her OMUT brand has seriously advanced: from the small metropolitan workshop of Klimova’s work they hit the Parisian showrooms and the shelves of Opening Ceremony store. We met with Nastya to talk about how this happened.
Text: Cvetlana Paderina
Childhood
I studied at the Yaroslavl Art School at the Faculty of Painting, but did not graduate from it - I realized that the soul of fine arts does not lie. Nevertheless, creativity has always been in my life. I was born in the village of Nifantovo, Vologda Oblast, a tiny settlement for eleven families, where my first strong impression was the house my father built — a birch log cabin with a spiral staircase. My father also bought art albums all the time: collections of reproductions of the Russian Museum, the Hermitage Museum, Prado, and I looked at them. My mother decorated the house from the inside, in our family it was customary to do handicrafts, for example, great-great-grandmother had sheathed the whole village before the revolution. I think that handicraft was a way to cope with need and spend time, a kind of entertainment or meditation. So I sewed too. First for dolls: I recently found children's albums, among which was a real fashion magazine, which I “released” at six years old.
At first I was planning to do clothes. After that, after analyzing sketches, clippings and bookmarks in magazines - the Internet and smartphones did not exist then - I realized that I was always more interested not in silhouettes, but in decorative solutions, additions, and accessories. The case finally helped to understand the preferences: once a friend left me with a bag of skin scraps, and I tried to do something with them. I immediately felt that it was mine. In the second half of the zero, information became more accessible, social networks appeared, blogs and sites like Look At Me, where you could read about designers from all over the world, and then I finally realized that jewelry is not only "earrings and bracelet", it can be generally anything.
First experience
I remember that my husband and I lived in “odnushku” on Kantemirovskaya, I recently gave birth to a child and did not understand where to go next. The advantage was that I did not work and I had some free time. Then the shooting of my first decorations took place in the kitchen of three by three meters, while somewhere in the legs a little son was crawling. Now many things that I created then seem naive and ridiculous to me, but I still like a part - for example, the second collection, in which I drew acrylic feathers and tried to work with leather as paper. I was interested in the natural texture of the skin, unevenness, and everything that in the leather industry is identified as a marriage. I dream of returning to work with this material and even recently took lessons in the workshop in order to expand my skills.
In 2010, I began to make the first jewelry under the brand OMUT. The name came immediately - it is in honor of the music album, recorded by an electronic engineer named MOX. His gloomy and frightening electrofolk impressed me greatly, and the word itself - short, capacious, graphically beautiful - accurately conveyed what I was creating: things-impressions. I dream to personally meet a musician, but, unfortunately, I can’t find him on social networks, so if anyone knows a guy, tell me - I’m ready to cooperate with him.
Cooperation
In many ways, the collaboration helped me understand myself. In 2012, I made four collections with different craftsmen: a jeweler, a knitter, an artist and an embroiderer. Lisa Smirnov, then still a beginning artist, I found on the site Look At Me in the stream "I myself", where people laid out their work. I fell in love with her free, direct and naive style - and a week later she already lived in my workshop and we worked on the general OMUT NAIVE collection. It was a collection of cotton garments: kerchief, dickey, top, apron, etc. - all with provocative embroidery. We wanted to rethink the format of embroidered rustic clothing and fill it with personal experiences (pMore about inspiration can be found here. - Note ed.).
Through this kind of cooperation, I tried to find the line between clothing and art. For example, together with the artist Anna Danilova, we made ornaments in the form of insects painted in the style of white-and-blue ceramics. The references combined Gzhel, tattoo aesthetics, and Sibari culture. With knitter Nastya Tsibizova, we created Rodarte accessories from irregularly knitted threads. And with the jeweler Sasha Bulanov experimented with armor. So I came to what I do now: objects from metal chains, from relatively small jewelry to items that can be called high-grade tops and dresses. I started with simple bodichains, which were then full of blogs - it was easy and demanded, so for a long time I didn’t take the metal seriously. Once I tried to gain volume from chains and received something like aluminum knitwear. It was in the scope of this material that it was revealed to me: from the point of view of plastic possibilities, and from the point of view of meanings.
Shortcuts
Metal threads, like strokes on a figure, emphasize the boundaries of the body, complete and hold the silhouette - it remains for me to be sensitive to proportions. My things are often called chain mail, but this is incorrect: they are made in a fundamentally different technique, which I developed myself. The creation of one item takes an average of ten to fifty hours of hard manual work, during which I should be as focused as possible - mistakes in the calculations are unacceptable. People often try to place OMUT in one of two camps: either “glamor” and deliberate sexuality, or dark-fashion. Despite the fact that my brand cooperates with some stores that work in the aesthetics of dark-fashion, for me this is a style frozen in time - heavy and theatrical - while OMUT is holding fast to the present.
I have always been inspired by crafts, manual labor and folk costume, and even minimalism in its deep understanding - as asceticism, rejection of superfluous. Of course, architecture and construction are important to me, sexuality is important as the interaction of body and culture. My muses are PJ Harvey and Charlotte Gainsbourg, I’m close to the bohemian images and fashion of the 70s, when the cut and silhouette were very free, but very sexy. My things are also free and plastic, you can move in them and generally do anything. Sometimes they are compared with the works of Paco Rabann, but I don’t want to go to pure futurism - I like the fact that these items can be combined. True, with the integration of OMUT objects into the familiar wardrobe, everything is not so simple: unfortunately, not all potential buyers are ready to solve such a creative task. This is paradoxical: I create things that should encourage creativity, but in order to sell, I have to offer ready-made and preferably simple stylistic solutions! The ideal heroine of the brand, of course, accepts the challenge - she is more interested in thinking and fantasizing herself.
Art for life
When we went to Paris for Fashion Week with the director of the brand Alena Koval, we saw how our things "work" in an ideal environment. I went in a mask, and it was an amazing experience, very positive: people came up and asked where to buy it. Alena also wore a top of chains, and this was also revealing - no one paid much attention, as if it was an everyday thing, although in Russia it seems extravagant to many people. The path from the workshop to the store is incredibly complicated: many people see themselves as our customers, but they think that they cannot wear it all. I would like to change the situation with the help of visual content, but so far there is not enough capacity, we have a very small team. However, this is task number one.
During the first five years of experiments, I did all the things in a single copy and almost did not take orders. I did not consider OMUT as a potentially successful commercial project, although almost everything was sold through social networks almost immediately after publication. One day, my regular client offered to help with the development of the brand, and this became the point of reference for OMUT as a brand, as a business. We made a website, started a small production and started working with shops. None of us had any education or experience in the field of fashion, we stuffed all the bumps together. For example, all expectations were too high: when we launched an online store, we immediately wanted to hire a call center operator to take orders that were supposed to fall down - in the end we did not need him for another year. We made a website in three languages, including Chinese, but it turned out that we could not build logistics with Asia. We wanted to enter the European market - but how? Tried promotion instagram account, people came to us, wrote "amazing", but no one bought anything.
Brand today
Last year, we began to cooperate with the Dear Progress showroom, which represents Russian brands abroad. For several years they have collected a powerful customer base, and working with them is a serious elevator for the designer, an opportunity to get a professional response and see how your personal ambitions match the realities of the world market. After the first showroom, we began to be sold in Opening Ceremony and several lesser-known stores in Paris and Tokyo. Now we are preparing for the second. Thanks to this collaboration, I understood why previous OMUT books were rarely not published in the press and why they were not interested in buyers. On the very first day of the meeting with Dear Progress, Denis and Sasha criticized our shootings - within a month we rewrote everything, rearranged and remade the online store. This is a very cool experience: criticism from the right people does not hurt you, but helps to move on.
There are only three people in OMUT. I am engaged in design and visual component, Alena - document flow, taxes, sales and other organizational issues. There is also a specialist who coordinates production. At the same time, people from the professional environment communicate with us as a large team, probably because we are workaholics and sometimes work for ten. One of the most instructive things for me is the realization that your creative snobbery is inappropriate at the beginning of the journey. I'll tell you a story. Once, celebrity instagram turned to us - I was superspeptically tuned, because its image was completely at odds with the brand spirit. However, cooperation with her was pleasant, productive and profitable, we received orders for dresses - and this is the most expensive line, the prices of which start from one hundred thousand rubles, and before that they simply did not buy.
Now OMUT is moving towards a more distinct statement. I go to meet the buyer and work with such specific forms as, for example, a dress-shirt or T-shirt, combining the traditional silhouette with our unusual material and aesthetics. These things will be easy to stylize. In parallel, we would like to develop the theme of clothing as an object that does not have to be worn, which may be present in the interior, and in the future, perhaps, will flow into an element of architecture.
Photo: OMUT jewelry
