A Fashion Designer, a Bridge Builder.
Roman by way of an Italian father with a Haitian mother.
She represents an intersecting point between two seemingly opposite cultures.
It is a cultural distillate, and a cross-border fertilization project, that she narrates through fashion, which she understands to be a tool and not solely an aesthetic landing point.
Fashion it’s a powerful international megaphone that allows beauty to make a pathway in the viewer, a pathway that, for her, transforms into a channel of integrationist contamination.
A collection is more than the sum of its garments; clothes can speak louder and in a more incisive manner than many words, somehow managing to ignite cultural fabric.
Muticulturalism is the gateway to social development.
“The meeting of cultures, and the relative inclusiveness, is an irreversible choice to this very day. The point at which we could decide whether or not to deal with others different from us, has already passed; the others are already part of us.”
“I am an example. And I think it is clear I am irreversible.”
LABORATORIO DELLE NAZIONI®
BUSINESS MODEL AND SUSTAIBABLE DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM
Stella Jean’s collection focuses on a standard of sustainability and multiculturalism applied to the fashion industry.
Acknowledging fashion’s potential, as a cultural activity, to provide significant opportunities for decent work for men and women around the world. It has a major impact on reducing poverty and contributes to development, which is primarily human, inclusive and fair.
Business Model and Sustainable Development Platform in 7 steps:
1. Craftmanship recovery
2. Cultural Heritage as an enabler and a driver of sustainable development
3. Enhancing opportunities through knowledge transfer and exchange
4. Enterprise creation
5. Promotion, such as tourism and commerce development
6. Enduring international trade development platform
7. Integrationist contamination
CULTURAL BRIDGE
Each SJ collection is the result of the construction of a cultural bridge between Italian design and the artisans of a developing country at each different season, or low income ones, such as Peru, Haiti, Burkina Faso, Mali and others in South America, Africa and Asia.
Stella goes in the field on mission, and after a first period of meeting and research of the various indigenous skills, many of which are dying out, she studies together with local artisans, how to develop a product fashion-textile-accessory combining the host country’s traditional craftsmanship with the well known Italian design and savoir-faire.
Nothing about them without them, an exchange of know-how, whose reactivation generates in the local populations a sense of self-sufficiency, deriving from the direct employment creation, businesses and training related to these recovered competencies and cultural resources.
This activity has the local objective to oppose a welfarism that has proved so far to be inefficient. It is a goal of integrationist contamination, which promotes a cultural crossover in which no identity is ever negotiated to create work that is not charity, but serious, purposeful and involved.
This is an international cooperation which aims to promote cultural heritage as an enabler and a driver of sustainable development. Despite the thousands of miles of distance that may lie between them, countless hands of women artisans in different countries work together in an Ideal Laboratory of Nations, with the common goal of caring and preserving an endangered global cultural heritage, with a sense of permeating the dignity of work as an indispensable element at any latitude. In doing so, these women are building their own economic autonomy, preserving their own traditions, and at the same time gaining a small seat at the global market table.
This mission statement is a voluntary declaration, which has a uniqueness that is revealed as a reflection of the designer’s personal multicultural DNA, translated into her signature style, as well as into a business model of sustainable development.
