Read Me

Dear Alicer,

 

This letter is for women who are desperate for a story to wrap themselves with.

​

Alice in Distress is not born as a vintage brand but as an art project. The Founder Beyza Kilicparlar, I, an Art Therapist, asked if a brand can have so much power for destruction why cannot it have the power to heal.

 

From the dawn of time, spilling from mythology to our bedtime stories, we are seeing the silhouette of the woman always tormented; tortured in the body, soul and mind; repressed, silenced, bound, buried, drowned, suffocated, controlled. Everything that serves woman’s wellbeing, serves and nourishes their nature has been taken away. As woman’s touch has been precluded, we all trapped in a world of a soulless rhythm; not natural nor right.  Even our clothes tell the fate of woman; tucked in corsets -cages made of bones-, buried under mounting layers, put on impossible heels. Woman were not allowed to move or even breathe freely by their own clothes; a perfect allegory made of woven.

​

Yet we still appear in every story and novel in full bloom; the nymph like maidens, the witty ladies who are the heart of tea parties, glamorous flappers, heavenly damsels in distress… There were, of course, some “bad seeds” in the man’s literary world; witches, evil step mothers, blood lust jealous wives, the mad ones… While our souls were dying, just a few men dared to not to call the distressed woman “neurotic” and tell the truth. Nobody knows their side of the story since these “dark, distressed creatures” only a product of man’s imagination. The real women were not given any amenities to tell their story, and more likely they were forbidden. So we did appear in the stories in full bloom, but we know our dying garden.

 

And Alice in Distress is just a project about that. It needs your imagination and that power of creation and healing that lies in you, which was so scary for many. She invites the audience, you, to engage with these stories. We may never touch the women that were depicted in the story but we touch their dresses. Through those dresses that has been part of a darker history, that was worn by a woman who had much less freedom than you, we will yell to the past, to the women who suffered for long without any consolation and tell them their screams are heard. We will walk in those dresses with freedom, joy, and everything else that has been taken away from us.

 

The brand is the marriage of literature, healing, art and the woven; the pen, the light, the heart and the needle.

​

We will stich again until it is right.  

 

And this is how Alice in Distress is born. Born with a craving to create a business that respects, celebrates and work with nature; challenges the history, the female narrative, the social order and the values which we adopted so deeply yet does not serve us in any way; uses the depts of imagination and heart to change the past, add the missing pages to the story. To take the good, the beauty of the past and leave behind whatever should be left behind. 

​

Thank you so much for hearing her story. Alice in Distress will be waiting for yours.

​

Lots of love,

Alice in Distress