Sweethearts Jazz Club Blog: It's all about elegance

Sunday, July 12, 2015

It's all about elegance

She’s personable… her down to earth personality is refreshingly authentic.
She’s not a quitter… She is doing in SL what she can’t in RL.
Her designs are stunning… and range from “girl next door” glam to sizzling siren, the choice is all yours.

Who am I talking about? This week Sweethearts Jazz Club shines our spotlight on Japanese, SL fashion designer of note, Mami Jewell. She is the owner and designer for one of the leading fashion houses of Second Life, AZUL.

Those of you who frequent Sweethearts Jazz Club regularly will know that we feature a designer from our shopping plaza every week and last week it was the turn of AZUL, and I undertook to have a chat with the lovely lady herself.

Mami lives in Tokyo. She graduated from the Art University where she studied Graphic Design. She has never worked as a Designer in Real Life. Here first job was an Architect Designer and the last one was for a trading company. She was introduced to Second Life by a friend and she decided that it offered her an excellent platform to try her hand at creating. It was something which she couldn't do in Real Life even though she loved it. She said “Now I am happy that I managed to be a creator in here, in Second Life.”

Mami told me that she got into fashion designing in SL when she was a newbie because her creative urge bubbled to the fore, and so it was back in 2007 that she started out creating skins, buildings and simple outfits, she added “I did not have any Lindens so believe it or not I did a lot of "camping" to get some money in order to be able to cover the upload charges. At the moment, I am grateful to be able to create anything I want but at that point of time I was only able to make clothes for myself. And that was the start of AZUL.”

I asked Mami what made her choose the name AZUL for her label? She said “This is actually something most people may not be expecting. Blue is the colour I love the most, and the very first store I rented was on a beach sim. So, I looked up how the word Blue is translated into other languages and I picked Portuguese, AZUL.

For Mami, inspiration comes to her from anything she sees or hears. Anything from boards on Pinterest or images on Facebook. Basically anything can really trigger a creative mind. She finds it exciting to see the art conveyed by the work that Photographers, Bloggers and Models come up with in SL. She said “They are using their utterly creative sense and bring the AZUL dresses into pieces of art. I love to see them.”

These days we have huge choices of brands and shops for our shopping delight, which Mami sees as a source of encouragement, she explained “I like it when people find new good stores and enjoy shopping. That pushes other creators to study and learn to make better things, and this subsequently results in the overall quality of creations in SL too rise.” Designing gowns that are both high quality and exquisite to look at are two of her main priorities and the tough competition and customers demand for quality keep her on her toes.

Looking to the future Mami enthusiastically said “In September we will have our new Miss AZUL. I am really looking forward to building a new AZUL with her and my amazing AZUL team, as well.”

The AZUL woman is all about elegance, so any lady who wants to be elegant should make AZUL her first stop.