designer of the brand IANIS CHAMALIDY
Text: L y u b o v M e l n i c k o w a
Thank you for taking time for an interview with us! We are happy to welcome you to PURPLE HAZE magazine. Before asking questions about the brand, I would like to learn more about the designer and founder of the brand Ianis Chamalidy.
Tell a little about yourself. How did your creative path begin and why did you decide to become a fashion designer?
Good afternoon! My name is IANIS CHAMALIDY, I am the founder of the IANIS CHAMALIDY brand and today I am the artistic director of the development department. I think my profession was a vocation and I unknowingly started this path. I liked making clothes because my grandmother sewed clothes. All my childhood was spent surrounded by women who try on clothes and my grandmother sewed for them. I saw it from an early age, absorbed it. My mother took me to the Mariinsky Theater, all kinds of exhibitions, museums. My childhood was spent in St. Petersburg, filled with historical and cultural heritage, and of course all this probably gave me a wonderful environment, gave me the desire to create clothes and continue the traditions of my family.
designer of the brand IANIS CHAMALIDY
What does fashion mean in your understanding?
In my understanding, fashion is a phenomenon that unites culture, economy and spiritual feelings of a person, the values of the country in which you live, his cultural heritage. All these are like reactions, they are reflected in fashion, and fashion is a product through which it is easy for a person to broadcast his world around him and very quickly convey to people the state in which he and the society around him are. Fashion is also an opportunity for me to express myself, my inner world, to find my sense of freedom. I studied not as a designer but as a fashion designer at the Stieglitz Academy and for me this is an opportunity to build my own world with its values that will completely suit me, because the world in which I live does not suit me, it is full of imperfections, lack of freedom, this world is sometimes very conflicted, it hurts my heart and I build my world through fashion, in which people are absolutely happy, they live in peace, in harmony like true Greeks because I am Greek. The theme of harmony is very important, especially since St. Petersburg in which I live is the city of the heir of the ancient world because in St. Petersburg all architecture, it celebrates the ancient world with its democracy, with its sense of freedom and aesthetics, because the Greeks have always supported aesthetics as the highest point of personal freedom.
Tell us a little about the brand. At what point did the idea of creating a brand come up?
I divide the IANIS CHAMALIDY brand into two periods. The first period was classical when I learned the canons of classical beauty, so to say, with the ancient world, lines, proportions, etc. Architecture, the history of costume, the history of cultures, which were constantly changing in the world, on a global scale of world culture. At some point I thought that I wanted to create my own language and I turned to my Greek ancestors and realized that a European costume, like, say, a little black dress from Coco Chanel, in which there is a form, it calls you to take this form and live according to the laws of this form, the mood of this form and me I wanted to go beyond this understanding. I turned to my ancestors and realized that the Greeks did not have a uniform, they were peplos, chitons. It was a garment that gave freedom to its owner to express his image through his inner world, through the harmony of the inner world and the social vector because we are always in society, we have a profession and we have a social vector along which we move and this harmony between the inner and the outer gives birth to this image of a person. The Greeks draped their dresses, they called it metamorphosis, when the shape could change, there was a lot written about it in legends. I began to create transforming clothes. I came to the concept of multi when, on the one hand, the thing is classic, strict, clean, devoid of unnecessary elements, some unnecessary details, and on the other hand, it is an avant-garde aesthetics where there are emotions, where there is a completely different reading. I combined two different phenomena: classical and avant-garde in one product and got my own concept in which I have been moving for 25 years, so many years to the brand IANIS CHAMALIDY.
As a rule, a clothing brand is a large team that takes part in the creation of collections. How many people are in the brand team and what are the
responsibilities of the chief designer?
Today I am the art director of the brand IANIS CHAMALIDY. 5 designers work with me in different directions because today we produce clothes, bags, accessories, men’s and women’s collections, underwear collections and jewelry collections. The brand also participates in theater projects, cinema, television, and much more.
In addition to designers, designers work. Their responsibilities include designing clothes according to the designer’s terms of reference. It is also very important for me to combine all the concepts. I come up with a design, volumes, proportions and give out a very clear task, probably without giving any freedom to the designer because I am a person who understands the design and how this design will be transformed, what technological details, seams, the whole technology. I decide up to how thick the threads will be, whether the stitches are made, the length of the stitch. It’s very important, it’s a whole art. All the fittings, the design of the fittings, I make the decisions myself. I really like it, to keep the creation of my product under control.
How would you describe the brand’s style?
Restrained refined refined style, aesthetically filled. It is filled with aesthetics, it is very important, it is very sensual, very relevant. It is very important for me that fashion is relevant. Today I have researched a person’s life, his speed of life, and I understand how I should create clothes that will help a person feel comfortable, stylish, pronounced in society.
Now many brands are for environmental friendliness and recycling. What materials does the Ianis Chamalidy brand use? Are you planning to create collections from recycled materials?
We used posters that hung on the streets of Italy and we recycled these banners into clothes. We had a whole direction and now we are creating fabrics that use a small amount of water for washing, less chemicals. These fabrics are very quickly erased, easy to dry. We do not use electricity for ironing with an iron. We are working very seriously on this issue and this is a whole direction in the brand.
On June 21, the Forte collection was shown as part of the Moscow Fashion Week. Tell us more about this collection. What inspired you to create it?
At fashion Week we showed the Spring Summer 23 collection, I called this collection „The Dividend“, this is a reflection on a person who has turned from an individual into a dividend. This is the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher who said that in the modern world a person will turn from an individual into a dividend. This is a new person, with a new understanding, a sense of life, who lives with a different speed of life than before. All the events that have happened, they have further strengthened us in understanding that in fact, a person who has gone through a pandemic, all the cataclysms and all these experiences, he turns from an individual into a dividend, because a person from a linear world where there is a floor and a ceiling, white and black, God and the devil, everything used to be it is very clear that I have moved into a linear virtual world, where the concept of human values is shifting. He ceases to live according to the norms and concepts that were in the past, and as if the research of this person, his speed of life, in general behavior, was created in the „Dividend“ collection. The collection reflected all these issues and reasonable use and global environmental things. When we brought the collection from St. Petersburg to Moscow, we did not steam it, it did not crumple. It is made of ecological materials, it is a synthetic that does not crumple, requires little water when washing, gets dirty less and is very tactile pleasant to the body. This topic of recycling, ecology and so on, we showed all this at fashion week.
Who is the Ianis Chamalidy brand for? Can you describe its target audience?
Today I dress a lot of artists, actors, people of creative professions, of course, and business people too, but most of my clients are business people who are in their own business, very creative people who go beyond the general concepts of style and beauty.
Ianis Chamalidy is a well-known brand in Russia. Would you like the brand to exist on the world market in the future?
Of course we want the brand to exist all over the world because customers wear IANIS CHAMALIDY clothes all over the world and the understanding of the brand is more global. It is like a reaction to cultural events, to a person, a global person, a person of the world, he travels, he has no borders, a person is absolutely free, a person of the world. For such free, creative, creative people, I create a collection, of course, this is a global client.
How would you describe today’s fashion and what feelings does evoke in you?
I see fashion today as very positive because fashion is always a tool for gaining freedom and fashion today offers a large number of solutions, ranging from absurd, ridiculous and useless, but as a manifestation of creative freedom, inner endless awakening of the personality, but the other side is very reasonable and caring about the future of a person. Fashion for me today shows the triumph of a person’s creativity and it inspires me very much.
