preTROL
(year 2000-2003)
It was during my university years when I started designing, and it was thanks to my friends. They sparked in me the desire to "make our own clothes." At some point, we decided to start a brand: initially, we called it Papúa, but as the name was already registered (and it seemed very difficult to find one that wasn't) we invented a very strange one: Atwöa (with umlaut and all), and we decided that it would be pronounced "Atchua".
One day we gathered all the clothes we had made. Mauro Gil took some really cool pictures of us, Esaú Acosta lent us his colorful house as the location, and his friendly neighbor downstairs let us use her clotheslines:
(Photos: Mauro Gil-Fournier)
We did a photoshoot, which later became a catalog, which we would later take to stores to show our designs (although due to life circumstances, we couldn't all be together in that catalog adventure).
The protagonists of this story are: Raquel Congosto, Lucía Sáinz and Carolina Cabello, my friends <3 I keep very nice memories of those first steps, learning from each other and experimenting with each new design!
One of our references was the Viennese painter Hundertwasser. We found joy and inspiration in his ideas:
"The absence of kitsch makes our lives unbearable."
"Diversity of colors brings an improvement, brings paradise."
"The uniform anonymity of clothing translates the person's renunciation of individualism, of pride in wearing a second skin that is creative, original, different from others."
"Men wear exactly the same, homogenizing clothes. Always the same gray pants. Which are neither black nor white nor green nor yellow, neither are they pink or brown pants; men's pants are gray."