People
BELIK: the dark side of a perfect woman
Belik fashion brand presentation. Photo © Belik team
Belik fashion brand presentation. Photo © Belik team
Belik fashion brand presentation. Photo © Belik team
Belik fashion brand presentation. Photo © Belik team
Designer Maria Belik. Photo © Belik team
Maria Belik names her brand, which she launched in September 2017, like “Post Couture” – it reflects designer’s conformism to Haute Couture and marks brand’s correspondence to contemporary concept.
What is BELIK’s DNA?
– Timeless and ageless elegance, perfect bespoke like fitting, bold character, balance of a complicated architectural cut with lightness and comfort.
Before creating your own brand, you have worked in fashion houses such as Steffie Christiaens in Paris and Ulyana Sergeenko in Moscow. When did you decide to create your own fashion brand?
– The idea to found my own brand came about by chance, but quite naturally. It happened in Paris in 2016, where I was on a sabbatical leave after 5 years of hard work at Ulyana Sergeenko Fashion House. At that moment I was making a portfolio to continue my work in the status of a hired designer in one of the Parisians Fashion Houses. At one large HR agency, I was advised to create my own project in order to separate my own vision from the DNA of the brands for which I had worked previously. The project turned out to be quite mature, it became obvious – it should be immediately launched into production. I returned to Moscow to do it, where at that time I had a team of high-level professionals (sales manager, designer, couture tailors), and we immediately set to work.
How did the work experience in other Fashion Houses help you to work upon your own project?
– At Steffie Christiaens fashion house in Paris, which more resembled an art laboratory, I was taught to experiment and search, and one more important thing I learnt there is that any plan can be realized. The work at Ulyana Sergeenko fashion house gave me an invaluable experience in a couture studio, the opportunity to interact with the highest craftsmen of cutting and tailoring, fully immersed in the subtleties of the profession. To begin with, we began to offer our sketches to customers and sell things at a 50% prepayment. This allowed us to start with the zero capital. We photographed ready-made things on models and sent to clients who cannot read the sketches. So we expanded our customer base. A year later, we began to earn enough to create a full collection.
What does manifest a dark side of perfect woman?
– For me, this is, above all, inner freedom, character, all facets of joie de vivre, bursting out of a perfect cover. We are able to combine uncompromising femininity, chastity of length with dangerous cuts and sculpted corsets, strictness with freedom of movement. This is such an ultimatum, absolute elegance on the verge of frivolity.
Imagine that BELIK fashion brand can wear any world style icon. Who would you choose and why?
– The brand does not have a specific style icon. Our stars are our clients. We broadcast our own image and are ready to make beautiful any girl from 16 to 106 years old.
What woman’s image influenced your personal style?
– Associations that have influenced my personal style and brand formation are a complex, tangled matter that does not fit into the framework of a single female image. I only remember my first visual shock: a sketch of a costume for the Zizi Jeanmaire show “Champagne Rosé“ by Yves Saint Laurent, where the ballerina in a graceful pose froze in a spray of pink feathers. For me, this naive childhood experience was the quintessence of the beauty of the female image.
