Echoes of plants 

I, Moon, want to tell you that one night I saw my reflection in the water of a river. It was called the Río de la Plata. When I looked into it, I was surrounded by plants, flowers and leaves.

The image captivated me. That same night I looked for some artisans who could immortalize that moment.

I let myself be carried away by the river water and made it to Uruguay. There I told what I had seen to some women who gladly accepted the assignment.

They showed me their hands and I knew from that moment that I was in the right place. They drew the wool they know as well as their hands. They called it merino.

As they spread it in their hands they told me about its softness, how perfect it was for warming and its longevity. With it they would see that the image I had seen would last forever.

They took me to their loom, they showed me how they used their hands to shape that material. For weeks, they explored the river. I illuminated them with all the strength of my completeness as they searched one by one for the leaves that I had told them that I had seen that night.

One by one they collected them. When they had them all, they gathered them together and wrapped them in a huge cloth. After a few days the plants appeared on the cloth. They had succeeded. They were just the plants and leaves that framed my face that night.

With them they made a shawl that would serve to remember that moment. Since then, it protects and shelters me when I’m waning.

From then on, I’ve seen many people wear the same clothes that they did me. This makes me happy. It’s the memory of a magical night, from which a new magic emerged from a reflection, the patient work of many artisans and a day in which we formed a sisterhood.

Process

To understand the story of “Merino”, Loona’s Collaboration Seven, we must go to Uruguay, the place where the Calmo brand was born, created by designer Alice Otegui as a window in which she could unleash a lot of ideas that will allow her to contribute to create a better world.

Alice studied Fashion Design at Uruguay’s ORT University, and was accepted to do an exchange at Parsons School of Design in New York. A period that marked her significantly “I learned about sustainability in fashion from a comprehensive approach, which covered all aspects from social to raw material,” she says in an interview. Upon returning to her country —and with her passion for craftsmanship– in 2017 the history of Calmo began to be written.

From the beginning, Calmo has been the place from which garments that live up to its name are created, those in which time and patience are the indispensable resource to create unique pieces that also honor the planet.

Their designs -created by women- involve raw material with sustainable certification; processes in which waste is avoided and where resources such as energy and water are taken care of. The final pieces also have a timeless appearance that gives them the possibility of being used for a lifetime.

Calmo’s philosophy combined very well with Loona’s, which is why Sharon Drijanski, founder of this collective, laid all the threads to create a Collaboration that would come to life in pieces that reflect the brand’s DNA.

Thus, in the collection, made up of three designs of ruanas and shawls, various creative values ​​of Calmo coexist. Starting with its fetish material: merino wool, a material that Otegui describes as “the cream of wool” due to its softness. She’s also sentimentally linked to it. Her father, an agronomist, promoted the genetic improvement of wool by crossing lambs with the best wool that, therefore, have had offspring from which a superior raw material is obtained. Today, Uruguay’s merino wool is recognized in the world for its warmth, flexibility, lightness and durability. And, among all the variety of materials, Calmo can proudly say that it works with one of the kindest on the planet, theirs is certified RWS (Responsible Wool Standard) which guarantees that the sheep are cared for in a responsible way.

Another of Calmo’s hallmarks has to do with a technique called “ecoprint” with which many designs take on a “more natural” appearance, the latter being said in the most literal sense possible. It’s a printing process that lasts several days in which the colors of various plants, flowers or seeds are transferred to the textiles. This material is placed by hand on a strip of cloth that is rolled up tightly to make a lump which is later placed in a boiling pot or submerged in water.

“This collaboration was a great opportunity to do things that had been left in the pipeline within Calmo”, says Alice in an interview: “to do something with an indigenous print”. And it is that, for this collaboration, she proposed a shawl model that has prints that reveal plants from trees that grow near the Río de la Plata: myrtle leaves, arazá and Uruguayan pepper tree, and marcela and greminea flowers.

Another of the pillars of Calmo is the artisan work and for the Collaboration Seven the wool has been spun on a loom in a process of several hours.on it. For its part, creating the felt for the pieces has also been a long-standing task. In the case of the ruana, it is an example of the recycling practices that are promoted within the brand, since its edges are made of leftover silk from other seasons.

Another detail that should not be lost sight of in the garments are the labels, which are stamped on cotton canvas and where the names of the artisans, the sheets used, the raw materials and the Loona logo appear. And the phrase LoonaxCalmo has also been included in the canvas bags in which you’ll receive the garments.

This is collaboration with unique pieces whose process gives us a good example of how life should be lived: without pause but without haste. Just calmly.