Iam a closed person. Noise, crowds, too many people at once — I feel it more than most, and I have never known what to do with that except withdraw a little, inside myself.
The wrong clothing makes this harder than standing there with nothing on at all. The right clothing does the opposite. Volume at the sleeve, at the waist, at the neck — it becomes a kind of shelter. On the days I feel unprotected, it is often the coat that protects me before anything else does.
The kimono was built from that feeling, deliberately.
A Piece With Three States
Snaps at the front hold the two panels closed. At the back, a second row sits only at the lower half, gathering the cloth there — open, the coat falls in one wide cone from shoulder to hem; fastened, it narrows gradually from the middle of the back down. A tie belt wraps the waist from underneath and comes through hidden seam openings to fasten at the front, so from the outside it reads as a single, deliberate line.
I wanted the woman wearing it to decide how the finished piece looks each day, not have it decided for her. Full volume, on the days she needs to disappear a little. A narrower line at the back, on the days she wants to be seen more clearly. Belted, something closer to a coat, waist acknowledged.
The Belt
This was the hardest part, and I did not expect it to be.
A belt that wraps the whole coat pulls the whole coat in — every figure ends up compressed the same way, and the back loses its shape. I did not want that. I wanted the tension only at the front, so the back could keep its volume regardless of who was wearing it.
We went through several ways of doing this before settling on the one we kept: the belt sits at the wearer's own waist, on the inside, and comes out through openings hidden in the side seams to fasten in front. It pulls nothing but itself. The coat stays full at the back on any figure, because the construction was worked out to make that true — not left to chance.
Then came the smaller, stranger problem: the hardware. A belt regulator that looked wrong could undo everything the construction had achieved. The snaps and the buckle come from entirely different manufacturers, made on entirely different machines — I went through more options than I want to admit, looking for the one pairing that would look made to complement each other, as if they had come from the same place. It took most of the spring to find it.
When I Knew
Before any piece goes into its final fabric, we build it in toile first — every correction, every adjustment tried on the mock-up, again and again, until it matches what we intended. Only then does it move to the real cloth.
We approved the kimono's toile in the middle of June. What changed after that was almost nothing — a buckle, a finish, small things. The first time I put the finished piece on, I felt it: this was what I had been trying to make.
Why Not Sooner
Zoye and Alen came first for a reason. We are still a young brand, and before making something less straightforward, I needed to understand our own women first — what they noticed, what they responded to, what actually mattered once a piece was on.
The kimono is not a basic piece. It is for the woman who does not want to choose one single look and keep it — who wants a piece that can move between several, without buying several. I built it also for something I kept hearing, in one form or another: a piece that fits well everywhere except one detail, and that detail is sewn in, final, impossible to change. The kimono is the opposite of that. Open the snaps, adjust the belt, close it differently — she shapes it toward herself, instead of the other way around.
Moss
I ordered this fabric as brown. I was standing in the mill in Italy when I chose it, under Italian light, and under that light it was, clearly and simply, a deep brown.
It arrived in Warsaw and was a different fabric. Not wrong — the sky here is simply not the one it was chosen under. I picked it in Italy, under Italian sun, and Warsaw's light is genuinely a different thing: softer, greyer, with far fewer hours of direct sun across the year. Where the light is direct, it still turns golden-brown. Where the light is low, which in Warsaw is most days, it settles into something closer to a deep, quiet green. I did not choose this. The fabric decides it on its own, depending on where she wears it, who is wearing it, and what the day is doing outside.
I came to prefer it this way. A colour that will not hold still felt right for a piece that will not hold one shape either.
Daria
Founder & Designer