The magic of creation

Strangely enough I start the in­ter­view as an ob­server but quickly dis­cover that this has an ad­van­tage. We de­cide to have a pre-in­ter­view cof­fee in a bar below Barcelona's En­cants mar­ket, Núria, my wife, and my­self. The plan is that from here I will go with Núria to her stu­dio and we will talk. In­stead I be­come an ob­server be­cause my wife is keen to know as much as she can about this young de­signer. I learn a num­ber of things; she is from l'Es­cala, she has been work­ing on her own for ex­actly one year, she has been in the Cata­lan cap­i­tal since she came to de­sign school at the age of 18. I also learn she knows her stuff, she iden­ti­fies the top my wife is wear­ing from one look say­ing “it's in the fab­ric and the cut, but also the way the dye is caste in the yarn and not after the fab­ric has been woven.” I also learn that de­sign is her life. When she be­gins to talk about what she does her face, voice and cor­po­ral ex­pres­sion all change. I am suit­ably im­pressed.

In her stu­dio-flat we get the basic things out of the way. De­sign school, her final year doing an in­tern­ship with Spain's lat­est king of de­sign, Josep Font. When she grad­u­ates, Font of­fers her a job and whisks her away to work on his first show in Paris in 2006. What was that like? “Heady, prepar­ing a show on-site, and his de­sign is so de­tailed. It's not my style but I learned so much about de­tail, the small things. Things you don't learn in de­sign school. I have been lucky to have such good teach­ers.”

An­other of those was TCN's Totón Comella, where she worked be­fore going it alone. I won­der if her style is in­flu­enced by those de­sign­ers. “Not re­ally, my in­spi­ra­tion comes from the things around me, things I see in the street, mag­a­zines, films, blogs, travel. I love to travel, Lon­don, Paris, es­pe­cially Lon­don. But in­spi­ra­tion is never copy­ing. It's tak­ing ideas and play­ing with them, mulling them over, at times for ages, per­haps putting them to­gether with other ideas. But copy, never.”

Going it alone, was it a big de­ci­sion? “More no than yes. It was the right thing to do at the right time. In fact most peo­ple told me later that they were sur­prised I took so long to go solo. I am com­fort­able with it.”

So, who does Núria Serra de­sign for, is there a par­tic­u­lar woman?

“Def­i­nitely. She's twenty-some­thing to fifty-some­thing. In­de­pen­dent, sure of her­self. She doesn't need other peo­ple to de­fine her. She is el­e­gant and prac­ti­cal and fem­i­nine, hard work­ing, con­fi­dent. She likes what she is.”

As I lis­ten to her ex­pla­na­tion I have the im­pres­sion that she might as well have been look­ing in the mir­ror. So the clothes you de­sign? “They are an ex­ten­sion of the woman, a state­ment. She doesn't wear clothes to tell the world what she is. Her clothes are sim­ply an ex­ter­nal­i­sa­tion. It's dif­fer­ent.”

I ask if her work has a sig­na­ture and she thinks a lit­tle. “The colours, most de­sign­ers move within a set of hues, tones they are com­fort­able with. With each col­lec­tion there are changes, but usu­ally sub­tle rather than ex­trav­a­gant. The tones vary slightly, the sat­u­ra­tion, and the light.” And in de­sign? “Not so much. I de­cided I wanted to work on a small scale. There are dis­ad­van­tages, of course, but one ad­van­tage is ex­clu­siv­ity and this is some­thing that is im­por­tant to me. I like the idea, and I think the client likes it even more, that the cre­ation she is wear­ing is ex­clu­sive, hers. Her. My cre­ations have a sig­na­ture in con­cept which is in all my work; el­e­gance, com­fort but es­pe­cially ex­clu­siv­ity be­cause every woman is an in­di­vid­ual, beau­ti­ful, ex­clu­sive.”

On the table be­tween us there is a cut­ting, some 10cm² , a very soft vel­vet, off-white. As we talk she con­tin­u­ously plays with it. She uses it to ex­plain to me what she is going to do with it and I re­alise that she is al­ready quite clear about what it will be­come. “It won't be ex­actly the same colour, but I like the tex­ture and the light it catches. It falls well and once I have the cut, the flow is flat­ter­ing.”

This is where I see the dif­fer­ence be­tween a de­signer and a cre­ative. The con­cept of play and the process of mak­ing some­thing from an idea. It sounds so sim­ple, but it is not be­cause it is far from in­ven­tion. One way of look­ing at it is un­der­stand­ing that cre­atives such as Núria, tend to take a vi­sion, an out­come, and then to some de­gree, ob­sess with it until they find the means to make the vi­sion re­al­ity.

That process needs a num­ber of things, but es­pe­cially time, and an en­vi­ron­ment. De­sigual set up 27-per­son de­sign teams as al­most co­coons and built the com­pany struc­ture around them. Mango had Enric Casi Brunsó to set up the me­chan­i­cal side of things. All to serve the cre­atives.

So, what about Núria Serra's one-woman cre­ative em­pire?

“I do it my­self.” What does that mean? “I find the peo­ple who can do for me what I can't do alone. I work with local peo­ple in and around Barcelona. I don't have one work­shop, I move from place to place. I se­lect short runs of fab­ric from dif­fer­ent pur­vey­ors, that adds to the ex­clu­siv­ity. Once the bolt runs out, that's it. It makes it spe­cial, sin­gu­lar. My clients know that.”

The same goes for sales and mar­ket­ing. Núria has an ac­tive and up-to-date Face­book sys­tem work­ing and now a new on-line shop: (www.​nur​iase​rrab​arce​lona.​com). Through Face­book, some of her clients have met oth­ers, and word-of-mouth is work­ing well for her. She also has rep­re­sen­ta­tives of­fer­ing her cre­ations to bou­tiques. That means that from time to time there is a mad rush to get an order filled as quickly as pos­si­ble and her team of col­lab­o­ra­tors swings into ac­tion with all the ef­f­i­cency of the de­sign and pro­duc­tion hub of the big names. “That doesn't mat­ter, “ she says. “It's ex­cit­ing and I like it small. Small is beau­ti­ful”. And life, what about life? She laughs, “I have a life out­side all of this”.

Be­fore we part com­pany, Núria tells me about the new col­lec­tion she is prepar­ing and I have to swear I won't tell any­one. I wish I could be­cause I love it. It's ex­cit­ing, fun, fresh, and best of all, it's her. Over the door as I leave I see the words: “Never stop be­liev­ing in your­self”.

Never bet­ter said.