Figura

Figura is the Italian word for figure, and this collection is shaped by one in particular ~ a statue carved thousands of years ago and placed inside the Tarxien temple in Malta. Only her lower half remains. At full size, she would have stood almost three metres tall, and her hips are very wide ~ they reminded me of my own.

I’ve been making simétrie for seven years now, and for most of that time I’ve been designing for the love of the craft. Being in a bigger body, it’s taken me a long time to find my personal style, and I haven’t always been confident enough to really investigate it. That has started to change in the last few years, as I’ve seen more bodies like mine represented as confident and strong. It’s still a work in progress.

Mum’s dad is from Sicily and her mum is from Bari, and Dad’s parents are from Malta. English is both my parents’ first language, but they mostly spoke Italian and Maltese with their own parents. I never learned either. They grew up at a time when fitting in meant assimilating, so the languages weren’t passed on. It’s easy to tell myself it’s all one culture anyway ~ the languages sound similar, so is it really that different? But growing up, it has felt more like living in a third culture. We didn’t even have the family tomato days. Somewhat out of place in fashion too, I wanted to connect with something, so I looked to my heritage.

Malta drew me in because there is so much history there. The first people to settle the islands came by boat from Sicily, where Mum’s dad is from, more than seven thousand years ago. From around 3600 BC they began building enormous megalithic temples across Malta and Gozo ~ older than the pyramids at Giza. How they did it still puzzles archaeologists, so much so that a legend says a giantess built the temple at Ġgantija by herself, with her baby on her shoulder. What a woman.

Inside these temples, archaeologists found figures that are colloquially called the ‘fat ladies’. They are very full, voluptuous figures. To me they look obviously female, although that has never been proven, and no one knows who they were carved in honour of. But someone carved them, and placed them in places of reverence and ritual. To discover that bodies like these were honoured at all felt like a homecoming, and gave me a safety in my body I hadn’t felt anywhere else before. It was the figure at Tarxien that I kept coming back to. In an industry that coerces women to shrink themselves, she helped me look more lovingly on my own shape.

Roundness, folds, dips. All are revered.

Each shape comes from a part of her. The Figura Tote has a bean-shaped base that widens like hips and legs, a pleat for the separation of the legs, and a dip in the topline for the lumps and bumps of a natural body. The Figura Wallet began as that same base, folded in half. The Figura Oculare Case exaggerates its curves on purpose, widening at the lenses, and the Petit Figura Tote carries the same fullness at a smaller size, made for leisure rather than work.

Getting here took months of research, references and patternmaking, then prototypes made and remade until they were right.

Three new colours join the collections. Fig is named for the backyard fig tree, but it’s more the colour of a marinated Sicilian olive. Almond is lightly toasted biscotti, and Peppercorn is finished with off-white stitching. They sit beside Passata and Black Rock.