Memories on Vanity

Milan welcomed me in winter. The streets were damp, trams crossed the city with a constant metallic sound, and people walked fast, covered in dark coats, as if they already perfectly knew the silent rhythm of the city. I came from Bogotá, from a different cold, a different fog, a different kind of melancholy. I had come to study fashion, after years of imagining what it meant to be in a city where design, art, and history seemed to breathe on every corner. I thought that upon arriving, I would feel certainty, permanent excitement, some kind of confirmation. But the opposite happened.

The closer I got to that world I had idealized for so long, the more an uncomfortable feeling appeared that I couldn't explain. Everything was beautiful: the schools, the collections, the impeccable shop windows, the conversations about luxury, craftsmanship, and creativity. However, behind all that beauty, I began to feel a void difficult to ignore. I constantly wondered what the real purpose of it all was. Why create more objects, more images, more clothes, if in the end we all face the same thing: time, wear, disappearance.

That feeling began to accompany me every day. So I started walking the city without looking for anything specific. I entered ancient churches, wandered through museums for hours, and observed paintings depicting withered flowers, motionless bodies, stopped clocks, and still lifes created centuries ago by artists obsessed with the fragility of life. It was there that I encountered the concept of vanitas. Not as an immediate aesthetic reference, but as a profoundly human idea: the need to constantly remind ourselves that everything ends and, at the same time, the desperate desire to leave something behind before disappearing.

I understood that this tension was also happening within me. I had come to Milan looking for growth, but I ended up facing much more personal questions. The collection began to emerge from that emotional breaking point, from the feeling of not finding meaning in what I had most wanted to do. And, paradoxically, it was precisely creating this collection that began to give me back that meaning.

Milan did not become an inspiration in a superficial way. It was not the romantic fantasy of "finding ideas" in Europe. What really happened was that the city reinforced my love for art and design. It reminded me why people have felt the need to create images, objects, and garments for centuries, even knowing that everything is temporary. Amidst that city built on history, beauty, and memory, I once again felt the emotional importance of creating.

And even being so far away, Bogotá never disappeared from the collection. In fact, it began to become more present. I found similarities between both cities, not necessarily visual, but emotional. Bogotá also has a particular melancholy: its gray skies, the fog over the mountains, the damp concrete, the feeling of beauty traversed by wear and contradiction. I understood that I was still designing from my Bogota and Latin American identity, even while working in Milan.

From there, VANITAS began to take shape. The collection became a personal reinterpretation of the classical concept, completely anchored to my emotional experience. At the same time, I developed much deeper textile research for the brand. I worked with merino wools, explored textile manipulations, jacquards, and new fibers that allowed me to construct more complex and sensitive surfaces. Each material began to function as an extension of the concept: eroded fabrics, layers that seemed to retain memory, garments built as emotional traces.

For the first time, I felt that technique and emotion were happening simultaneously. I was no longer designing solely from the image or silhouette, but from a more intimate need to find meaning through the creative process. VANITAS ended up becoming that: a record of a moment of personal transformation, a collection born from questioning, but also from the need to reconcile with the act of creating.