HERE COMES THE SUN
July. Already summer, not yet on holiday. Literally and worryingly burning hot. Juggling with work and kids at home. Trying to escape whilst keeping my feet on the ground.
Together with my amazing team, we’ve been working for months on pieces for the winter you will (hopefully) want to wear forever. A few weeks ago, we shot our new pieces at home with my friends Ali and Val. Less travel, more comfort, in the inspiring and beautiful setting of the Spanish mountains we’ve now lived in for 2 years. I can’t wait to share those with you.
To be fair, I haven’t just worked; I’ve traveled too - without moving: reading, watching movies, listening to music, hiking in the mountains nearby - and here are a few of the things that have inspired and moved me most.
For over a week now, my beloved husband and business partner Augustin has been confined at home - a reminder this is not over yet. As our 2 little ones were away with friends and family, together with my eldest daughter, we packed our bags and went bivouacking in the Sierra de Guadarrama, where we live. Nature and us, going to sleep with the moon, waking up with the sun. Unsettlingly beautiful, soothing and reviving.
With the warmer days, we’ve set up a little open-air cinema in the garden, with cables everywhere and a projector that’s so old we need to wait for it to be pitch black for us to see something. But it’s so nice to be lying down on a deck chair with nothing else but trees and the sky above your head, watching my childhood favorite Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue) and its incredible Mediterranean landscapes, reliving our road trip through New Mexico with Thelma & Louise, enjoying the calm, slow pace and silence of Drive My Car, in stark contrast with the permanent tiktokisation of culture and content nowadays.
I’ve also traveled with my ears, listening on repeat to Sharon Van Etten’s latest album We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong and Verde Prato’s Kondeira Eder Hura entirely sung in Basque, as well as working to the sound of Gaspar Claus’ soothing Tancade instrumental sounds and dancing to Rusowsky’s So So tune, which I came to realise is using a sample of one of my favorite songs, Comme Un P’tit Coquelicot - in a very different style. Discover all of them on my L’Envers playlist!
Because the direction the world is moving is worrying me, as it’s probably worrying all of you, climate change and the current global crisis have monopolized most of what I’ve been reading right now. The books that have been feeding our discussions at home and with friends lately are Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons For The 21st Century - asking a lot of good questions about decisions and actions that we should collectively take about our future, with the same impressive capacity to sum up our history and the directions it took as in Sapiens - and Gregory Pouy’s Insoutenable Paradis (available in French only), about how we can improve the impact of our lives, and how it can actually contribute to our living a happier life.
In a few days, I’ll be traveling for real, to France to see our friends and families - something I’m really looking forward to. I wish you all a fantastic summer!
Julie
