Natalia Brilli's Cabinet of Curiosities

Natalia Brilli is certainly one of the most promising accessory designers out of the new generation of European talents. Her designs have this unique style that makes them immediately recognisable. Leather is her sacred material and the modern update of the long forgotten encasing technique she’s using give her the world as a limit. She extended this technique to all fields associated with accessories: Jewelry, bags, objects and more, and her creativity was awarded with the Andam French fashion price in 2006. For Modo Brussels, Brilli collaborated with Brussels based flower master Thierry Boutemy, who created all the floral installations for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.

Inspired from ancient anatomical engraving of skeleton and vegetals, Brilli and Boutemy turned the windows of exclusive accessories store Beau into a fantasmagoric skeletal still life, a real Nature Morte, as the French calls it. The skeleton are leather encased by hand and a piece like that takes up to 80 hours of work reveals Brilli, her quest for perfection being so deep that she even bothered placing little insects replicas here and there n the skeletons and the floral compostion, bringing the installation to what I imagine would have been worthy of the most refined 17th century cabinet of curiosities. That is one of Brilli's strengths; transforming past technics into future classics.