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"NOEST"
Derived from Nusantara, is a fictional Indonesian streetwear brand built from two sets of public domain archives.
I created 2 styles in this project:
For the product Style, I used a Dutch colonial railway photograph album from Java (1865–1868, Rijksmuseum), a Lamaholot woman’s skirt from Flores (late 19th century, The Met), a 13th-century Javanese bronze hand bell with naga dragon, and a 10th-century Javanese bronze makara water spout. Their textures and ornament became the surface language of every piece such as jacket, pants, bag, and skirt.
For the lookbook Style, I used three colonial portrait photographs from the Rijksmuseum: a studio portrait of a Javanese woman by Kassian Céphas, a young Javanese prince on horseback by Woodbury & Page, and a portrait of painter Raden Saleh, giving the editorial the same sepia, studio-lit aesthetic as the original colonial documentation. The result forces colonial archives to dress and be worn by the very people they once documented.
Social Post: Instagram
Lookbook Project: Noest Lookbook
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Nocturnes of 2126✨
What if Van Gogh and Whistler had painted the night of 2126? 🌙 Nine nocturnes of a future city (robot hounds, rainy delivery bots, air ferries, a tree wired with light), painted with a custom Recraft style built from public-domain paintings at The Met and the Smithsonian.
I went digging through the open-access collections of The Met and the Smithsonian looking for the night. I found Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 Saint-Rémy paintings (Cypresses, Wheat Field with Cypresses, Olive Trees, Irises) for their swirling impasto, and James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturnes (Bognor, Valparaiso) for their deep blue darkness lit by small points of gold. I blended the two into a Recraft style, then chained a second style from its results to lock in a cobalt-and-amber night palette. Nocturnes of 2126 uses that 1889 brush to paint a future neither artist could imagine: robot hounds, delivery bots in the rain, silent air ferries, AR lenses and glass houses with solar roofs, all at blue hour.
The style is public, so try it yourself 👇
day by the day work you are doing is outstanding man.
While digging through the Rijksmuseum's public domain collection, I found George Barbier's Falbalas et Fanfreluches, a 1920s almanac of hand-stenciled fashion plates that promised fashions "present, past & future."
I built a custom Recraft Style from 10 of his plates, cropping away captions and borders so only his jewel-toned colors, elegant linework, and
confident Parisiennes remained.
Then I gave Barbier the future edition he never got to make: his women deadlifting, running boardrooms, livestreaming makeup tutorials, swiping through suitors and DJing until dawn.
Each scene is presented as a post on Falbalas, an imaginary 1920s social feed where the admirers are many and the comments are scandalized.
It's a celebration of women taking up space, drawn in the style of an artist who always made them the most powerful people in the room.
Present, past, future..wow! All in one, amazing work!
7:30 a.m. First coffee. Same ritual, every single day.
Some people have a sweet tooth. I have a coffee tooth. And while the kettle boils, I usually catch myself daydreaming about the same place: Japan, a trip I’ve wanted to take for years.
For this challenge, I brought the two together. Digging through public domain archives, I found Japanese woodblock prints with rolling waves, round windows, cherry blossoms and graceful women drawn in a few calm, confident lines. I turned them into a custom Recraft Style and gave it a brief no Edo-era print shop could have imagined: a modern café, with takeaway cups, delivery bags, loyalty cards and an ordering app.
The café is called Mado, “window” in Japanese: a small window to slow down in a busy day. Its barista, also Mado, wears an indigo wave apron, a round-window hairpin and wireless earbuds. She remembers your oat milk order, protects the window seats from video calls, and believes every laptop should close when the cake arrives.
Old prints, new rituals. My entry for the Contra × Recraft Archive Style Challenge.
Such an original idea! 😍