In February we showed in the Marais. A small rail, in a city I had never been to, a few months after the brand began.
I still cannot write that sentence without wanting to soften it. To explain how small the rail was, in case anyone pictures more than there was. Most of this story lives inside that instinct.
A Message in December
It was snowing the day Joanne wrote to me. She runs Shaare, a multi-brand space in Paris, and she was offering Âme Dare a place in it.
I read the message. I put the phone down. I read it again.
The Marais is where brands with long histories sit — names everybody knows, houses older than I am. I had never been to Paris. Not once, not as a tourist, not for a day. And somebody was asking whether I would like to put my clothes there.
I did not answer for days. Not because I was weighing it up. Because I did not know what a person says to that.
When I finally started thinking practically, the arithmetic was simple and unkind. Preparation, production, shipping the pieces, the flight, somewhere to sleep, building the display, standing in it for a week — all of it was mine. There was nobody who could come with me. That frightened me more than the money did.
Twenty-Five Euros
When I opened the flight search, I was looking only at what was discounted. That was the whole search. Not dates, not times — only what I could pay for.
There was a ticket to Paris for twenty-five euros.
I sat with that number for a while. I am not superstitious, and I do not usually go looking for signs. But I needed something from outside my own head to tell me I could do this, and that was what arrived.
Then a second thing arrived. Première Vision was running in Paris during the same days — the fabric fair I had wanted to walk through long before there was a brand to walk through it for.
Two things I had quietly wanted for years, landing in the same week, in a city I had never seen. I stopped arguing with myself and bought the ticket.
What Travelled With Me
The pieces went ahead by courier. What did not fit in that shipment travelled with me — in a small black case with our name taped to the side.
I labelled it the way you label freight, as though the case were part of the brand's logistics rather than simply my luggage. Standing at the airport, looking down at it, that felt slightly absurd and entirely serious at the same time.
It was the first time Âme Dare had gone anywhere.
Arriving
Paris from the window was enormous, and grey, and entirely indifferent to me, which was somehow steadying.
I set the rail up alone. Hung every piece myself, straightened the shoulders, moved the hangers a centimetre at a time until the line looked right, put out the card with our name on it. Around me were other brands, other rails, other people's years of work.
Then I stood beside ours and waited to see what would happen.
Première Vision
I did not go for inspiration. I went to understand how this industry actually works — where cloth comes from, who makes it, on what terms.
What struck me first was the scale of the choice. Hall after hall of mills and tanneries, each with its own way of working. I spent the day choosing by what people could put in my hands, and left with contacts I still consider among the best I have found. Piotr, from a Spanish leather house, wrote on the swatches I could not put down — samples I would like to build new silhouettes from one day.
Not all of it is for us yet. Many of these houses work in volumes we cannot meet. I kept every contact anyway.
What I took away was how narrowly I had been thinking. The industry is enormous, and for almost any question there is an answer somewhere inside it. The work is knowing how to look — and recognising what shares your intention when you find it.
I left with a bag of swatches, a page of contacts and feet that hurt for two days. One day there was nowhere near enough.
Why Paris
People ask why not Warsaw. I love this city, and watching Polish brands grow here is one of the pleasures of working from it. If the right space appears, Âme Dare will show in Warsaw too.
But Paris is larger in a way that has nothing to do with size. People arrive there specifically to see something they have not seen at home, with their attention already switched on. In one week I met people from countries and continents I would never have reached from a rail anywhere else.
What They Reached For
Everything we had at the time: Zoye, Alen and Dune. Three pieces on one small rail.
I did not expect Alen to be the one. It was — consistently. Joanne told me afterwards that she had watched people come in, look along the rail and stop there. It was the piece they pointed at, and the first thing most of them wanted to try.
I am hard on my own work, harder than anyone else is. But I understand them. Alen is light in a way that is difficult to photograph and impossible to miss in a room.
Hearing It Out Loud
Nobody who came knew the brand. Âme Dare is not built on me — I am not a public person, my circle is small, and there is nothing behind the label except the silhouettes and whatever we can reach on a very small budget.
Which is why that week took something out of me and gave something back at the same time.
Every online order leaves here with my hands shaking. You work on a piece for months, you pack it, you send it to a woman you have never met, and then you wait. There have been days when the thought that she might open the box and feel nothing was heavier than all the work that went into it.
In Paris, for the first time, I heard the answer out loud. From people standing in front of me. Touching the wool, turning a sleeve over, saying what they thought without knowing what it meant to me.
Noa and Biel — thank you for what you said about Dune on one of those days. You could not have known how much I needed to hear it.
What I Brought Home
A bag of swatches. A page of contacts. Aching feet. Several people I am still in touch with months later.
And something steadier than any of that: the knowledge that the work reaches people when it is put in front of them. Not everyone. But the right ones — and they are out there, in cities I have not been to yet.
What Comes Next
I am looking for the next spaces — multi-brand shops and pop-ups whose aesthetic and thinking sit close to ours. In Warsaw, and elsewhere.
I am difficult about this. I say yes only to what convinces me before I have finished reasoning about it, which makes the search slower than it could be. For a brand that does not produce in volume, that seems right.
What I want is narrow. That when a woman thinks about a coat, Âme Dare comes to mind — made by hand from beginning to end, in numbers small enough that she will be one of very few people in the world wearing that design. Some pieces will be made in larger quantities in time. The intimacy is the part I do not intend to give up.
Darya
Founder & Designer