Ame Apolinário talks to us about SouPreto Fashion Week and their latest editorial.
Ame Apolinário founded the fashion week in São Paulo known as ‘SouPreto Fashion Week’. SoupretoFW was the first Afro-diasporic fashion week in Brazil and Latin America, conceived by the cultural collective CEMFREIO. The project aims to create mechanisms and tools for the diffusion and construction of black culture through fashion. SouPreto aims to document fashion possibilities through a black perspective. Based on concepts exploring what culture is and how identity is constructed, it aims to understand and deconstruct narratives creating a new space to explore black culture.
SoupretoFW is the first fashion and style week that proposes a breakthrough in Afro-diasporic documentation in Brazil, an event to bring together fashion, music, entertainment and entrepreneurship in order to strengthen and support affective economy of creative spaces in the black communities of the city of São Paulo. Its primary goal is to bring together and build bonds of belonging among the creative subjects, their aesthetic-peripheral expressions and the community.
The SoupretoFW, has become an alternative space for the Brazilian black community who dreamed all their life of the fashion Industry and didn’t want to give their power for the Caucasian and elitist fashion market in Brazil. In our first edition we showcased more than 15 runways shows, including Wig collections, Genderless and Performance Fashion Shows.
Their next show ‘Quem Viver Verão’ will take place in May this year and will be exploring the question: about what it will be like next summer without a vaccine? It will showcase the next generation of daytime fashion, with runways of wigs, nails and shoes.
Find them on Instagram @soupretofw or on their website SouPreto.cc
In their latest editorial ‘Suada’, they explore Black Brazilian and diasporic aesthetic and identity and how that fits within broader contexts of global warming, capitalism and the future.
Here Ame talks through the inspiration behind the editorial.
Imagine a future where water is the most expensive thing on earth. The rich use water as jewellery in the form of ice. Water dripping from ice symbolises resources wasted.
In a parallel universe, where everything is able to mutate, water becomes chewable and its shape is a chewing gum. Everything is synthetic.
In another time where wealth is measured in other ways.
The surface of earth is so hot that everything that touches it burns instantly.
fire.
pure fire.
however, in a calmer place, sober… we have the ones who saved themselves, the ones who stayed free and pure and conquered the water, going through it until they reach underwater, which was taken away from terra brasilis, people that rose for the myth of water, people who lean on wealth that has always been theirs. They live now and today, and they sound like wind. This is the SUADAS generation, sweaty generation.
Water is not only part of their body, but also grows on the outside. It is not possible that your t-shirt has the weight of trillions litres. Today is the moment for you to save the surface of earth, because we don’t know if we’re all going to be SUADAS. All would be blessed. If everyone will be SUADAS. Sweaty.
Not all will be.
of water.
Ame Apolinário is an experienced director and fashion designer who has worked on several YouTube Hits such as ‘Todo Dia’ de Pabllo Vittar, ‘Bumbum de Ouro’ de Glória Groove and others. Raised in a neighbourhood with the highest rate of underage Febem ex-convicts in São Paulo, Apolinário, changed the history previously made for his life and created the SouPreto Fashion Week. A multifaceted artist, Apolinário is a fashion enthusiast who now wants to take the world by BLACKSTORM.
Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion 