SHLZ: Jeanswear from Petersburg

IN THE WEEKLY RUBRIC "NEW MARK"Wonderzine presents young designers and tells where and how you can buy their things. Our heroes this week are a young brand from St. Petersburg who has taken on the creation of simple and beautiful clothes for every day at affordable prices.

The founders of the SHLZ brand are Ekaterina and Sergey Shulzhenko, a young couple from St. Petersburg. The story of the emergence of SHLZ proves that an important point for young designers is the presence of a competent business strategy. For example, Shulzhenko did not have a specialized design education: Katya studied public relations and advertising, and Sergey studied economics and management. But the couple had experience directly related to the industry and the fashion business. Katya led the project of young designers "Admiralty Needle" and was engaged in PR of Aurora Fashion Week (we hope that the show or the presentation of the SHLZ brand in the framework of AFW is not far off). Sergey has eight years of work in the democratic Russian-Swedish company Concept Club and, accordingly, experience from purchases to opening stores throughout Russia and the development of the brand. The business approach is obvious: simultaneously with the launch of the first collection of the brand, Katya and Serozha opened their own online store with delivery throughout the country.

The idea of the SHLZ brand was simple - to create wearable and affordable unisex clothing for most: jackets and denim skirts with torn edges, jeans, cotton shirts, neoprene bomber jackets. The pair sews all the things according to their sketches at a small production in St. Petersburg, and buys fabrics in Moscow. In the studio, designers independently make manual processing of fabrics - they age and wipe denim. So they managed to occupy a vacant niche: Russian brands working with denim - during the day with fire.

We were too lazy to go shopping and think about combinations, and this problem is familiar to many. I wanted to create things that you just put on, go about your business and look cool at the same time. In other words, having conceived our own brand, we wanted people to stop thinking about clothes. Denim was chosen as the key material, because it gives the opportunity to create a cool manual processing. We are impressed by what Marques'Almeida, Hood By Air, KTZ and our countrywoman Dasha Selyanova, the designer of the ZDDZ brand, are impressed with. All of them are about the feeling of freedom that clothing gives.