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by Eugene Rabkin
"Graduates of the prestigious Antwerp Academy fashion program, the Capara sisters have worked with Dries Van Noten, Martin Margiela, and Raf Simons, before launching their eponymous line out of Antwerp.
The Capara sisters work on their fashion line in a brutalist building in the center of Antwerp that the city’s government rents out to designers and artists. The Bosnia-born twins, Olivera and Vera, run a skeleton crew, with two assistants and a couple of interns for their women’s line, CAPARA, which ranges from complicated, off-kilter tailoring to sweatshirts and tees produced in collaboration with Fixmer/McCarthy, the industrial techno project from Douglas McCarthy, the frontman of Nitzer Ebb. On a recent visit in November, the bare space contained several long tables and a couple of racks with Capara’s latest “drop.”
For the past year the design duo eschewed the traditional seasonal fashion model, offering capsule collections of eleven pieces they release in limited edition on the 11th of every month on their website. Besides designing, the Capara sisters pour most of their resources into image making that accompany each drop. Their website is refreshingly different from the cookie-cutter e-commerce platforms that the Internet is awash with and is a testament to the sisters’ creativity that has long been known in Antwerp’s tightly-knit fashion community, but rarely outside of it.
It’s hard to describe CAPARA’s clothes in words, except to say that they demand closer inspection. They are neither paired down in that tired “classic with a twist way,” nor complicated for complexity’s sake. Rather, they look like a product of long, deliberate thought process. “We often start with one idea, an image, and work from it. And the image can be completely mundane, even banal,” says Olivera. In the current series of drops the sisters were fascinated by an image of a man surrounded by plastic bags. The quotidian nature of plastic struck them as very much out of line with what fashion should be. “We want to combine our love for something very dark with something very classic. We like to take luxury and fuck it up,” says Olivera.
At the same time, there is also something gentle about their work – it’s far away from the cheap sex and glamor that so much fashion still revels in, and it’s refreshingly far away from the logomania that’s now back with a vengeance. These are not clothes made for Instagram, but for women. “We like working around the garment, something we learned from Martin Margiela,” says Olivera. “We don’t want to make clothes just for show. It’s a product that has to work.”"
Read the full interview on SZ-MAG
"Graduates of the prestigious Antwerp Academy fashion program, the Capara sisters have worked with Dries Van Noten, Martin Margiela, and Raf Simons, before launching their eponymous line out of Antwerp.
The Capara sisters work on their fashion line in a brutalist building in the center of Antwerp that the city’s government rents out to designers and artists. The Bosnia-born twins, Olivera and Vera, run a skeleton crew, with two assistants and a couple of interns for their women’s line, CAPARA, which ranges from complicated, off-kilter tailoring to sweatshirts and tees produced in collaboration with Fixmer/McCarthy, the industrial techno project from Douglas McCarthy, the frontman of Nitzer Ebb. On a recent visit in November, the bare space contained several long tables and a couple of racks with Capara’s latest “drop.”
For the past year the design duo eschewed the traditional seasonal fashion model, offering capsule collections of eleven pieces they release in limited edition on the 11th of every month on their website. Besides designing, the Capara sisters pour most of their resources into image making that accompany each drop. Their website is refreshingly different from the cookie-cutter e-commerce platforms that the Internet is awash with and is a testament to the sisters’ creativity that has long been known in Antwerp’s tightly-knit fashion community, but rarely outside of it.
It’s hard to describe CAPARA’s clothes in words, except to say that they demand closer inspection. They are neither paired down in that tired “classic with a twist way,” nor complicated for complexity’s sake. Rather, they look like a product of long, deliberate thought process. “We often start with one idea, an image, and work from it. And the image can be completely mundane, even banal,” says Olivera. In the current series of drops the sisters were fascinated by an image of a man surrounded by plastic bags. The quotidian nature of plastic struck them as very much out of line with what fashion should be. “We want to combine our love for something very dark with something very classic. We like to take luxury and fuck it up,” says Olivera.
At the same time, there is also something gentle about their work – it’s far away from the cheap sex and glamor that so much fashion still revels in, and it’s refreshingly far away from the logomania that’s now back with a vengeance. These are not clothes made for Instagram, but for women. “We like working around the garment, something we learned from Martin Margiela,” says Olivera. “We don’t want to make clothes just for show. It’s a product that has to work.”"
Read the full interview on SZ-MAG