Xonguila spoke to the promising designer Cuccla, to get to know her collections a little better. Despite her still short career, the designer is already a reference in national fashion who has had a very positive impact on the market.
How did the desire to create a fashion brand arise?
While I was taking my course, which was in Fashion Design and Pattern Cutting, a strong desire arose to create a ready-to-wear clothing brand produced in Mozambique. A practical and functional brand, but one that conveyed our essence. I started with a beachwear line, with bikinis designed and produced in my atelier, and also some light, fresh pieces full of summer, with a strong focus on linen and cotton, because they are fabrics made from natural fibres. The collections that followed brought more and more pieces that could be worn on other occasions.
“I designed various models of kimonos and light, flowing dresses, wrap skirts, trousers and relaxed shirts in linen and cotton, which could be worn either to be comfortable at home or to be functional in our day-to-day lives”
Tell us a little about how your creative process works, what inspires you, what leads you to launch such creative collections.
I do not always follow the same sequence, but I would say I start by defining a theme, then I sketch out some ideas, designs and prints on paper. At the same time, there is a whole round of market research going on, to choose materials, fabrics and accessories, and then we put together the colour palette. It is a very long process and it is looked at and revised countless times. So far, I have felt there has been a very great inner search, and that all the collections, unconsciously, end up reflecting my state of mind during the process. The Lotus collection, for example, was conceived at the height of the pandemic in Mozambique, in 2021, a rather difficult time when, given the circumstances, we were all forced to look at ourselves more closely, and we took the opportunity to have an inner clear-out and focus more on what is essential. I feel that, from that set of principles, a collection emerged that spoke a great deal about the importance of the wellbeing of body and mind, and so I designed various models of kimonos and light, flowing dresses, wrap skirts, trousers and relaxed shirts in linen and cotton, which could be worn either to be comfortable at home – because being at home does not mean we have to be dishevelled – or to be functional in our day-to-day lives. My new collection is bolder than the previous ones and I also feel it came with a more fun fashion. We brought more structured and elaborate designs, such as the tailoring pieces, coats and waistcoats. Another aspect that stands out in this collection is the approach to embroidery, crochet, pieces made in macramé and the proposal of colour-block outfits. From our DNA we kept linen, cotton poplin and other fabrics with cotton fibres.
I think all the collections so far express different moments in my life. They are all part of me, so, personally speaking, I cannot have a preference for any of them. Looking at them with a more clinical eye, the last two were more challenging. To give you an idea, the construction of the patterns for the Terre collection alone took approximately six months, not counting the time to assemble the designs for the entire collection. When I am creating a collection, I do not always follow the same schedule; what can also change is the order of importance of the tasks. In any case, creating a fashion collection is a process that involves many stages, including a lot of research to observe consumers’ tastes and trends during that period. I consider this to be one of the key points. The choice of the main theme and the building of the storytelling, which is precisely what will create a relationship between the piece and the consumer. I remember that, when I started working on the latest collection, Fall/Winter – Libertá, I had little more than two pilot pieces; meanwhile I imagined one of the settings in which I thought the pieces would be best represented, and from there the other pieces that would complete the moment were born. We recreated that setting recently, after the collection was finished, to photograph the clothes.
We know that all businesses were affected in some way by the pandemic. In your case, did you suffer any impact?
The pandemic spurred the creation of my brand. If I already had a great desire to develop a clothing line that respected the characteristics of our bodies and was accessible to our reality, with the pandemic that desire became a necessity. Since people were forbidden to travel, a curiosity was also awakened for what was produced locally. On the other hand, I think the pandemic brought us to our senses about the unbalanced way in which we, globally, became a high-consumption society, and the real damage of that excess. In effect, we began to have a greater awareness that fast fashion and rapid mass production naturally cause massive and often unnecessary consumption, and this awareness steered many people towards brands that work at a more measured pace, producing pieces in smaller quantities with a longer useful life – We call for exclusivity, and the planet says thank you!
How did you conceive this latest collection?
For this collection, I went on a journey that led me to imagine the wardrobe of Maria Helena, the name of the persona. Maria Helena, the woman who gets up with the first ray of sun, ready to face the day in her best spirits. She lovingly embraces the daily challenge of being a mother, wife, daughter, older sister, housewife, tennis player, director… without giving up her professional and personal dreams. Maria Helena is whatever she wants to be. An enigmatic fact about her: words like “giving up” hardly even gain a foothold in her life. I am also talking about a Maria Helena who is on a tireless quest for self-knowledge and self-worth. Being Maria Helena is going further, to achieve what until now few dare to conquer. It is searching for something unattainable but, above all, it is being the woman who knows herself as mistress of herself, who accepts herself and is on first-name terms with freedom.
We know you took part in Fashion Sunset. Tell us what that experience was like.
Fashion Sunset was born of a partnership with KIA. I started working on the Autumn collection in January 2022 and, soon afterwards, I was contacted by KIA to develop a project together. They were going to launch the new Sportage model, which is a car much sought after by women, and, bearing in mind the narrative of the collection we were designing, we realised that associating the new Sportage with the launch of CUCCLA’s Fall collection made perfect sense. We then devised a private event, at sunset, at the Southern Sun, where we welcomed the people who had been part of the brand’s story since the beginning. The show was wonderful and at the end we were all very happy.
