Dekaibrands, Kylza Ribas and Fashion from the Outside

It gives me great pleasure to find hidden fashion treasures when I travel; stores with merchandise I haven't seen before, designers or designs that any fashion catwalk has offered me yet, fashion facts that any book has explained to me ... it makes me realize that fashion is a part of human culture and not a part of Paris or London's market.

Massah Kaikai had a very similar thought...

Massah sent me an email during fashion week about her soon-to-be-launched fashion business Dekaibrands, a personal project that was born after two trips, one in Morocco and the other in Brazil, when she decided to support young designers from burgeoning fashion capitals around the world.
She was showing for the first time the work of Brazilian designer Kylza Ribas and invited me to attend the event.

The date changed a couple of times but finally, last Wednesday Sept 19, in the impressive pent house of The Time Hotel in Manhattan, the event took place.
The work of Kylza is very elaborate and I was amazed by the explanation of how some of those dresses were made and how much time it took to finish them.
Her collections, (she brought samples from all of them), are very different from each other, so that sometimes they seem designed from completely different designers.
She explained to me, half in Portuguese half in Spanish and half in English, with the help of her mother, that for each collection she takes a subject to develop, which is what everyone does, but in her case, I can tell, she really means it: everything is so that subject, that any past inspiration is just forgotten.

Her fall-winter 07-08 collection Pieces of Time was my favourite, but I wonder if that was because it's the most "European"-like, which gives me very little credit if I'm trying to sell my open-minded view of fashion... o well...

Here samples of Pieces of Time and The House.