Flowen, the luxury brand founded by wife-and-husband team Flavia Lowenstein and Juan Azulay, creates designs that flow into the world of undiscovered specimens that shine through their high-end accessories. More on contemporary fashion and trends.
The duo’s avant-garde designs are open to personal interpretations: where one might perceive prehistoric fossils, someone else may see microscopic sea life or imagine otherworldly organisms. Flowen merges innovative design and technology to create computer generated pieces inspired by math and science.
“What inspires us are the things we discover by looking carefully at what we might otherwise not know or notice,” says Lowenstein, Flowen’s Founder and Creative Director. “Flowen is truly multidisciplinary as part of the source material comes from scientific texts and drawing, and studies in mathematics and geometry.”
Flavia Lowenstein & Juan Azulay.
Both Lowenstein and Azulay share a passion for the arts that is evident in Flowen. The duo worked for three years to bring Flowen to fruition. Azulay is a renowned architect, media art producer, art director, and stylist. Lowenstein, a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology in Accessories Design, also holds a Masters degree in Fashion Product Development and Management from Instituto Marangoni in Italy. She served as the founder and buyer of L’Emporio, a luxury five-story concept store in her native Buenos Aires. In 1999, Lowenstein moved to Florida, where she worked as Associate Director of DLFA, Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts, a renowned art gallery in Miami’s Wynwood district, and served as a committee member for Art in Public Places in Miami Beach.
Flowen’s enigmatic first collection appealed to customers who are charmed by the unusual. Aptly titled Specimens, the collection made its debut in the Fossil Lab at LA’s George Page Museum in April 2015. Specimens featured seven pieces, all with intricate webbing design, including pendants, earrings, and clutches. An examination of the cellular structure of rare microorganisms, the models manage to look tough—as if they’ve survived for eons—yet delicate, as if their webbing could come apart at any time.
The pieces began as sketches that became 2D computer models before taking on their 3D forms.
The collection is made from Italian silver, with 24k gold, 18K rose gold or rubberized gommato coating. Some pieces have precious stone embellishments, like diamonds or sapphires. The endo and exo clutches, both sold in limited quantities, also boast the finest premium Napa leather and exotic skins. As if celebrating the asymmetry found in nature, Flowen also sells some of their earrings as individual affirmations of personal style. One of our favorites was the OXA model, a statement piece that looks hauntingly ethereal due to its bone white gommato coating.
“The Specimens collection places particular interest at the cellular structure of living things as one might find in rare plants or animal kingdom microorganisms, terrestrial, and marine. Zoological and botanical and sometimes mineral structures are things we’ve been paying attention to. To notice, you’d have to start looking at things really close up and observe their cellular formation. There’s an aura of science fiction in the specimens collection, but largely because the rare things we study in nature are stranger than fiction,” says Lowenstein.
By creating a world where high fashion, art, and science act collectively, Flowen delivers thought provoking wearable art. It’s a different voice in the world of fashion, one that can haunt, stimulate and intrigue. ■
