Marques' Almeida, Denim Masters

Marta Marquez and Paulo Almeida are originally from Portugal. The guys met when they entered the CITEX fashion school and graduated from it in 2007. After a couple of years, after taking part in several competitions and internships, Martha and Paulo moved to London. They completed internships at Preen and Vivienne Westwood and in 2009 entered the magistracy of Central Saint Martins. Just studying in British college, Marquez and Almeida started working as a duet, which is a bit strange - as the designers say, they have completely different tastes. "We were very afraid to talk about what we want to do joint projects. We talked with one of the teachers, and he said that this did not happen in CSM for 10 or 15 years. But when we turned to the director of the master's course, Louise Wilson, she supported us ", - Marta and Paulo comment.

The debut joint collection Marques' Almeida was shown in 2011 when it was released from Central Saint Martins: it consisted entirely of denim and was inspired by the 1990s. The duo explains their choice in the following way: “Denim can be worked in a bunch of different ways. In addition, it’s not typical for brands and graduates to sew a collection entirely of this material. To be honest, at first, working with denim seemed like a battle to us. Denim is made up of denim brands: they want to work with stretching materials, and we wanted a very dense and simple fabric. " Leading magazines in one voice argued that Martha and Paulo managed to make denim clothes nothing like: dresses with raw edges, baggy tops with scuffs and soiling and pants, from which the middle is literally cut. By the way, designers buried things from this collection into the ground to achieve the effect of antiquity, which is why the models were vaccinated against tetanus before the show.

The debut collection of Martha and Paulo was so successful that the organization of young designers Fashion East called them to do a show at London Fashion Week. Thanks to this opportunity, the following works of the duet were noticed by Opening Ceremony buyers. The store received so many orders for the Marquez and Almeida collections that he had to repeat the order: Opening Ceremony said that their things fly like hot cakes. Since then, the aesthetics of designers has undergone minor changes. They still draw inspiration from everyday life and ordinary girls. Even without the 1990s, Kurt Cobain and the i-D magazine clippings and The Face does not do. But the latest collections of Martha and Paulo are less aggressive and more feminine. Designers work not only with denim, which they still wash and tear, but also use silk and fur of pastel shades. Soon the Marques' Almeida show can be seen in Russia: in April, the duet goes to Aurora Fashion Week in St. Petersburg.