Anna October for joie de vivre

Modern grace and joy are key words to Anna October aesthetics.

Anna October is a women’s wear designer creating garments with attention to high quality fabrics and feminine silhouettes, inspired by contemporary architecture. Her family name October was given to her grandfather after The Great October Revolution, 1917. After two years studying fine art in Odessa, Anna launched her own brand focused on women’s wear and she was mentioned in the best international fashion magazines.

With a background in pattern cutting, tailoring and fine art, Anna October reconstructs vintage styles from the past decades and approaches colour as a modernist artist, creating timeless and cinematically feminine pieces to want, love and wear round-the-clock.

The fact that she will be a designer, Anna knew from the childhood. At the age of 15-16 she worked as a fashion editor of the Zaporizhzhya "Poster". She went to the Ukrainian Fashion Week shows and asked the insiders a direct question:

“I want to be a designer, what should I do?”

Andre Tan advised her to go to London, and if there is not enough money to study there, learn to sew here. So October left school and entered the Zaporizhzhya College of Technology and Design.

At the age of 15, she began to sew collections. More precisely, she found craftsmen, and she drew sketches and searched for clients - “a commercial vein appeared”. She moved to Odessa, enrolling in an art school at the department of painting, and began to conduct collections. Then the local press spoke about the young designer from Odessa.

Anna October has been enjoying a steady stream of success the past few years. In addition to being an LVMH Prize finalist in 2015, she's stocked internationally at Harvey Nichols in Hong Kong, and online at Moda Operandi, Shopbop, and MatchesFashion. Her frilly, often off-the-shoulder dresses have a commercial appeal that separates her from other Ukrainian designers, though they had become somewhat predictable.

October founded its brand in 2010. Then a logo arose that resembled “a line and a zipper, swift and charismatic,” and the site started working.

There were frivolous photos on Instagram with the hashtag #AnnaOctoberLadies. It accompanied the easy-going girls in Anna October dresses all over the world. The hashtag became a kind of instagram equivalent of the famous "beauty is the promise of happiness."

Anna October's things carry the idea of ​​a better life - a happier, more fulfilling life

Anna October

“Anya, you’re a lady,” her mother told the future designer for disciplinary purposes - the fateful #AnnaOctoberLadies was born in childhood.

Mom was the standard of a lady. She wore three-piece suits with hats. She worked in the police, from an ordinary investigator to the rank of lieutenant colonel. And she called herself "fifth generation intelligentsia." All this protected me from self-identification with Zaporizhzhya reality. It gave me confidence and strength to try

Anna October

Work on the collection is a designer’s favorite pastime, but it doesn’t stop thinking about the future of the brand.

“I dreamed of becoming a designer. It came true. Learned how to make and sell dresses. And somehow I thought: what then? - says October. - A business can become successful and useless if you do not think in advance what will constitute its so-called corporate social responsibility."

Anna has already thought through everything - even how to develop humanitarian projects in individual business areas:

“There are many boys and girls who were born, like me, in Zaporozhye, who cannot receive a decent education, but have a wild desire to do something. To train them and find them to use - it would be interesting to do projects in this direction. "

Anna October

Now works in Kyiv, Ukraine. 

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