Romania is a country with great traditions, but these traditions struggle to survive.

The villages are poor and local craftsmen struggle to make a living out of their work.

Big fashion houses like Dior are using the fashion pieces, including them in their own collections, but offering no credit. So nothing returns to the community in terms of money or even PR that can be converted.

We created Bihor Couture, a brand meant to show the world the real designers of the traditional jacket and to create a system that manages to get money back to the community.

The first brand that fights against cultural appropriation.

To promote it, we started a digital platform where people could buy the authentic fashion pieces from Bihor.

Bihor Couture is not only a brand that sells authentic clothes.

It serves as a model created to return money to the local communities, so everybody can enjoy these traditions for generations to come. The model can be an inspiration for other cultures that face the same problem.

We promoted the new brand and the online shop with a fashion video content series, featuring the original designers from Bihor.

Then, we created print ads featuring our designers and targeted international celebrities interested in Dior, like Lady Gaga or Beyonce, with customized messages from our local creators. What followed was an invitation to Dior to come to Bihor and design a new coat with our designers.

We even made it to Paris Fashion Week, proudly wearing the coat from Bihor and thus, making a statement to the entire world of fashion.

The campaign made a huge impact, with people storming the website and placing hundreds of orders for traditional clothes. Presently, more craftsmen are being brought into the platform, to work on all the orders that keep on coming.

Pre-orders were made to cover the work for the next 4,5 years.

Beau Monde also raised money to fund the only craftsmen school in Bihor, to attract more young people that can learn the craft and it further in the future.

So the tradition lives on.

We wanted to save the local traditions from Bihor, first making the designers known to the entire world as the original designers of the jacket that Dior failed to credit. Then, help them sell the authentic pieces not only to Romanians but to everyone in the world.

A long history of cultural appropriation

Big fashion houses have been using inspiration from the local cultures of many countries without acknowledging that culture or giving credit to the original creators.

Cultural Appropriation = the act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own, without showing that you understand or respect this culture (Cambridge Dictionary).

Stella McCartney used traditional African motives in her Summer/Spring 2018 collection. Louis Vuitton debuted a line of blankets, worn as coats by the people of Besotho, as part of their menswear collection. Dior made an entire collection out of a print identical to one of a local Indian designer. Just last year, Tory Burch copied a Romanian coat from Oltenia.

Just last year, Dior included a Romanian jacket from Bihor in their couture collection and sold that jacket for 30,000 Euro.

With big brands offering no credit, no money returns to the poor communities so the tradition dies.

Beau Monde, a fashion magazine with 100% original Romanian content, wanted to help authenticity survive.