Chat: Depression

Throughout my life or rather my educational career, I have at times been in "states of depression" where I don't know where I'm going and I don't know what I want to do. I used to like take my own "off day" from school (my parents were well aware, don't worry) go to a cafe with my notebook and a cup of coffee and contemplate, brainstorm and release my frustrations on what my future career was going to be. I guess i never exactly found a career that appealed to me greatly until I graduated and started to "play" and just explore and experiment. That's when I found photography and felt that ok, I'm going to be a photographer.

So when I met the guys Andrew and Kenny from Depression, their stories really spoke to me because I realized that there's always this state of frustration or slight depression that makes you want to do something. One just has to break out of it and then the creative juices are free to flow.

Sitting down on this metal bench in the concrete plastered store at Parco with the guys. Kenny turns on the music and grabbing their starbucks, we settled in to chat about how the guys started on this adventure and the story behind their name.



"I was an art director at an advertising agency," says Andrew, as he pulled up a stool near to the laptop "I was there for 10 years and Kenny was the copy writer and we worked as a team there. Advertising is fun for me, but the creative culture is still rather conservative in the asian market. So this really made me feel like doing something that is my own."

"We were at yakun that time and had just quit our jobs" explains Kenny "and we felt depressed with no direction. So we came up with the name Depression. It's also very anti-establishment because most names are very positive and happy. But for us it's more important to have a reaction then to have no reaction."

"We wanted to do something that impacted people's lives more directly and still create things." says Kenny as he takes a sip of his green tea latte. "Fashion is just a different canvas for us. It's a great satisfaction when you see people wearing our designs."

Chat: OWNMUSE

It’s noontime at the OWNMUSE store located at Parco Millenium and Shu Juang, one half of the design duo for ownmuse, is hanging up new stock that came in for the Autumn/Winter collection. A few minutes later Johanna joins the little pow wow and the interview begins!
The first thing I notice immediately is that both girls dress extremely comfy. If you ask me, for most working girls, comfort is crucial and yet you don’t want to do it without style. The two of them manage to find that perfect balance of style and comfort, which I think, is strongly reflected in their designs.

The theme for their Autumn/Winter collection is called “down to earth”. What I would describe as a dessert sand storm hitting the black concrete of city dwellers. In earth tones, dusty pinks and blacks made in comfortable and luxurious fabrics such as chiffon and suede, their pieces really form the sand in your cement wardrobe…ok, excuse the weird analogy of clothes haha.

Inspiration behind “Down to Earth, by ownmuse”
Johanna: We were actually very much inspired by fabrics, like this gauze like material that we found in hong kong.
ShuJuang: Ya, we really liked how it was quite translucent and you can add two layers (in different shapes) and play with the transparency of it.