The Cool Drop: Creatives Single-handedly Healing My Inner Child
Now trending: color, femininity, and play.
I didn't experience much of the nineties, but I look back on some of my kindergarten outfits and think: iconic. More than the era itself was the feeling — the pure joy of getting dressed. And coloring. From a young age, clothes meant something to me. Worlds I could step into. Colors I could carry everywhere. They were special in the way that they calmed me, made me feel more like myself. An armor of identity I never wanted to put down.
It’s that joy I remember clearly, and also somehow forgot to bring with me. So when I started stumbling upon these designers and creatives, I felt something close to genuine gratitude. Reintroduced to a version of myself that knew getting dressed, and seeing the world, could just be fun.
Florentina Leitner
The first question I asked myself when I found her: who is she? Immediate interest, immediate curiosity. Her pieces feel like a reconnection to childhood, but through the lens of the cool older girl I imagined when I was younger. There’s a softness, a femininity, and an ease of experimentation. The kind of creativity only a young girl knows, before it sometimes gets quietly taken from her.
An Austrian designer who used clothing as narrative long before launching her own brand, Leitner spent years designing womenswear for Dries Van Noten before going out on her own in 2021. It is a world I feel called back to. A future I am interested in inhabited.
Kasia Kucharska
Berlin-based Kasia Kucharska takes traditional craft and pulls it into new territory. Her garments are built around sustainable manufacturing techniques, which we love, but they are so much more than an eco-friendly label. They are one-of-a-kind pieces made by someone who knows how to have a good time. Forget traditional and trade it for natural latex.
Chrissie Abbott
The first time I saw Chrissie Abbott’s work, I didn’t have words for it. I still might not. Collaged, maximalist, and not scared. It pulls from early internet aesthetics, retro-futurism, and the kind of color only someone with genuine joy in their practice reaches for. It feels like stumbling into someone’s very specific, very vivid imagination. I discovered her through a recent collaboration with Hattie Stewart, and I haven’t looked away since. It just feels right.
August Barron
Obviously, August Barron. Fashion duo Bror August Vestbø and Benjamin Barron are the princesses of my modern world. Bror said it best in an interview with Dazed: “When you’re little and queer, you feel it immediately — the disconnect between who you want to be and who you’re supposed to be. I think that makes you sensitive to contradiction forever. Our clothes are about that — clothing that’s open to different experiences in a way.”
Somehow, that tells you everything.
May we all find our way back to the things that made us feel most like ourselves.
Speak soon,
Kelly