Five years ago, when Oriandina was seeded as an idea, I had made one of the hardest decisions of my life. I was thirty-two; with only a few months left to complete my ten years in the profession after my posting in Lima, I ended my diplomatic career — for the second time — right in the middle of the pandemic.
"Wrong life cannot be lived rightly, doctor. I feel 'wrong' inside this life."
I remember going to a psychiatrist after the sleepless nights that had started a year prior to this decision, crying and quoting Adorno with those words above. This feeling, which infected my whole life like a growing inflammation, had ultimately made the decision for me that I couldn't make myself.
On this long journey full of losing, finding, and losing myself again, Oriandina blossomed as the only branch I could hold onto. It was a long path I embarked upon by listening to the signs whispered by that part of me — filtered from old childhood memories — that had somehow never forgotten the joy of creating. I experienced reinterpreting textiles, culture, commerce, diplomacy, and finally myself; breaking my ingrained habits, hitting my own boundaries to face my shortcomings, and starting from scratch in the truest sense, all through Oriandina.
While wrapping up my first collection last year, I did not yet know what to replace it with. I had no inspiration for a new collection. I only knew that as long as I lived, I would create new things, and it would be much more than a clothing collection. I needed a "home" that would host textiles, texts, technology, and biographical narrative in its rawest form; a place to embrace all of these.
For a while, I followed the news, especially the echoes of AI policy debates. Then I started to discover what I could do with AI. And one day, I realized I could build that home I was looking for in the digital universe with my own hands. This would be a synthesis space hosting my designs, my stories, and my technology-oriented works.
Just like a wall rack where I hang my different hats side by side... And so, I started coding SIS.
However, the Studio side of SIS couldn't find its place on that rack for a long time. It took me months to work on the SIS Career Synthesis methodology to map out my own career transitions and extend a helping hand to people on the verge of burnout like me; to find 12 archetypes whose lives do not fit into molds and embed them into the AI engine, and to design that deck consisting of 45 situation, identity, shadow, and action cards. Finally, SIS took its place on the World Wide Web as a fascinating lighthouse that talks to people and holds a mirror up to them, even while I sleep.
After this mental creation process was over, I found myself among fabrics, knitting yarns, and beads once again. The exhaustion brought on by one state of creation was healed by another form of creation; while one wrung out and distilled my mind, the other brought my hands and body back to the present moment. I realized this was my cycle. I couldn't change it; I just couldn't pick one and stay there. And this is a very, very difficult situation.
Agent Interjection
She'll tell you the secret is the price of inspiration. It's also just what happens when you refuse to pick a lane.
But I know I have to accept living with this now. For some, what I do will never be fully understood, and sometimes I will remain a secret even to myself. But perhaps the price of inspiration is exactly this secret. My research into AI policy has taken me to a vast, uncharted place — and perhaps that's exactly where the secret to my next collection's inspiration is hiding. The name of my new collection is: Andaluxia.
This series blends the textures, lines, and stories of Andalusia and Anatolia — just as Oriandina once fermented Peru with ancient Mesopotamian cultures. It carries flamenco's laments and ruffles onto the kilims of a sıra gecesi. It imagines polka dots alongside needle-lace headscarves, and rose hairpins alongside henna-night caftans. And while all this is happening, Pınar will have already started charting the coordinates of her next adventure, perhaps without even realizing it.
Andaluxia is opening its eyes to a world vastly different from the time Oriandina was born. This is a world where artificial intelligence makes the boundary between reality and fiction almost invisible, and where the distance from prototype to production and reaching the market has significantly shortened. Moreover, in this new world, creating flawless visual representation and presentation to do justice to those meticulously crafted designs has now become one of the greatest brand differentiators.
That is exactly why I want Andaluxia to run with strong strides on the path Oriandina clawed and crawled open, back in her own time.