Behind V.DE.VINSTER
Who is Virginia?
Virginie de Vinster is atypical. She didn't go to fashion design school. She didn't go through the big fashion houses either. Her own university was Africa, where she worked for 15 years. His apprenticeship, travels across the Sahel, Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo, Ghana.
In Africa, Virginie began by observing weavers and dyers. She strolled through the markets and browsed the stalls filled with multicolored loincloths. She has always been amazed by the incredible creativity of artisans and by the urban cultures of West Africa... Her travels in the bush also made her discover the slowness of time and listening to others, the symbolic force things, conviviality and the transmission of values… And then Virginie the adventurer went to India and South-East Asia, to Peru and the Andes. She observed other professions, other customs and other people there.
Creation Process
This global experience encouraged her to love and support these people who had become friends. She wanted to bring them together through their know-how. His talent is to wonderfully mix styles and materials and to blend cultures through the simplest and most natural of objects: clothing. Created at the end of a trip, each of its collections is an adventure.
The beginnings
In 2006, it was almost as fun that Virginie started making Wax clothes, mixing the traditional loincloth with Western cuts. Then she got into the play of colors and editing. After African Wax as a raw material, she took hold of the good old French white Marcel which she customized. Immediate success at a show with Japanese buyers as its first customers… His eponymous brand is launched.
Ethical Elegance
Her key words: simplicity of form, respect for materials, the poetry of an outfit that was dyed, knitted, or sewn in a remote village in Peru or Rajasthan. Her gamble is to create clothes using ancestral materials and processes, such as Tie-Dye or "block print" on long silk dresses, her thread and bead embroidery on balloon sleeves, her Himalayan pashmina blouses, her Ikat fabrics, another dyeing and knotting process...
Chic ethnic wear that encapsulates Virginie's lifestyle. At a time when all fashion brands claim "sustainability," ethics, eco-responsible manufacturing, and organic materials, Virginie de Vinster is a pioneer in the "slow fashion" world. For 15 years, her philosophy has been to make each garment a story, like a travel diary that evokes a taste for other places and people... and incidentally makes one beautiful.