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I built NOIR & THREADS - MAISON 1913, a luxury fashion label system for the Recraft Styles Challenge.
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OFF THE CUFF. Business on top. Personality underneath.
You know those businessmen who wear perfectly tailored suits, polished shoes, and then surprise you with the most colorful socks when they sit down? I've always loved that little detail. 😂
When I discovered Albert Racinet's L'Ornement Polychrome, a collection of beautiful ornamental designs published between 1869 and 1873, I immediately thought these patterns deserved a comeback.
So I imagined OFF THE CUFF, a fictional menswear accessories brand creating matching silk ties and colorful dress socks for gentlemen who take their careers seriously, but not necessarily themselves.
Using Racinet's historical illustrations from The Public Domain Review, I explored how these intricate 19th-century patterns could become a contemporary fashion collection through a custom Recraft Style.
The idea is to keep things elegant and understated above the desk, while letting a little personality show underneath it.
Kalighat 2026: The Machines Are the New Babus
Kalighat paintings were cheap bazaar watercolours sold in 1880s Calcutta, and they were satire: they mocked the city's new rich, dandies who aped their British masters and lounged while servants fanned them.
I trained a Recraft V4 Style on five anonymous Kalighat sheets from the Cleveland Museum of Art and Wellcome Collection, keeping the bold single outline, flat colour and empty paper ground.
Then I turned the satire on 2026: the machines are the new babus. Phones smoke hookahs on velvet chairs, robot vacuums ride in palanquins, and humans fan, carry and groom their devices. Same masters, new hardware.
Social post: https://lnkd.in/p/gXJn_FQQ
For this project, I created a custom visual style called “Pastel Reverie V4” in Recraft. Inspired by Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Odalisque (1862), I explored how the elegance of historical painting could be reimagined through imaginative haute couture.
Using Recraft, I developed a cohesive collection of eight original fashion concepts inspired by ornamental peacock feathers, swans, luxurious fabrics, elaborate embroidery, and classical silhouettes. Each image was generated using my custom Pastel Reverie V4 style to maintain a consistent artistic direction while exploring different designs, colors, and forms.
My goal was to bridge historical fine art and contemporary fantasy fashion, transforming the atmosphere of a classical painting into a distinctive visual collection.