By Kuya Allen
Most clothes leave your life the way they came in, quietly, a season at a time. A few stay. You keep them through moves and breakups and closet purges, and you can’t fully explain why, except that you were someone specific when you wore them.
Camilla Franks builds for those few. Every CAMILLA print starts as an original artwork, hand-painted in her Sydney atelier before it touches fabric, and some pieces take her artisans in India more than 180 hours of handwork. The label started at Bondi Beach as resort wear more than twenty years ago. It has since grown into ready-to-wear, tailoring, denim, and accessories, a collection with The Met, and now Paris.
Paris by CAMILLA came out of the flea markets of Saint-Ouen, the streets of Montmartre, and the gilded rooms of Versailles, and she shot the campaign on location in the city.
We talked about what a print looks like while it’s still paint, the artisans the customer never sees, the day she had The Met to herself, and what she hopes someone feels when they open a wardrobe twenty years from now.
A lot of fashion runs on forgetting. New drop, new season, new reason to want what you don’t have yet. Camilla Franks has spent more than two decades building against that current at the speed of a hand: paint before fabric, embroidery before machines, the same artisan partner for twenty years.
What stays with me is how she talks about Paris. She never claims to have captured the city. She followed it, into flea markets and corners and a room she wasn’t supposed to be in, and came home with fragments. Her customers end up doing the same thing with her clothes. They take them to weddings, on holidays, through nights that run past 2am, and each dress picks up a story nobody in the atelier designed.
No atelier can finish that part of the work. The artisans give a piece its 180 hours. The woman who keeps it for twenty years gives it everything else.