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Creatives in Practice: HELIOT EMIL’s Julius & Victor Juul
To dive straight into it, you guys are a brand from Copenhagen, Denmark; it’s where you both grew up and started the brand. Tell us about how the brand’s existence began.
V: So, we split everything down the middle, I take care of the business and the more commercial part and Julius takes care of all of the creative and the design parts.
J: We started the brand in Spring/Summer 2017; that was the first collection that we did. Victor and I, obviously being brothers, we’ve been together since birth so we’ve always been very close and we always wanted to do something together. I was working in the creative direction side of the fashion industry before and Victor was in business school, so it kind of made sense to combine the forces that we have and create something. I think it was a natural progression to do something in the fashion industry. We are also seeing it more now as an umbrella that encapsulates a lot of different aspects, so not only limited to the fashion industry… we’re also trying some different stuff in interior design, the gastronomy space, experimental spaces, so really trying to see if it’s possible to make something that encapsulates more than just fashion.
Wow, that makes sense! We can see that even going into your most recent collection. Just before we go into the collection, why did you guys decide to start showing in Paris being a Copenhagen brand? What prompted the shift from Copenhagen Fashion Week to Paris Fashion Week?
J: Copenhagen, as amazing and as great as it really is, it is a rather small city. We have always seen ourselves as more of a global community and brand where we connect with people from all over the world, and they (Paris) align with our vision and universe. So we’ve always wanted to reach a larger audience and with Paris sort of being the epicentre of fashion, especially the fashion show aspect of things, it was always a dream to be able to show in Paris, being the biggest pinnacle of this industry.
V: Just to add something to that, we always had ambitions as a brand to become a big fashion house and we really want to scale this to become something bigger than what the platform of Copenhagen Fashion Week can house, so that’s also why we want to drive for perfection and for the biggest possibilities. That is what the platform of Paris Fashion Week can accommodate in a sense.