Dora Abodi

I was born in Kolozsvár Transylvania, in a multicultural artist family, my parents are fine artists and painters and my grandfather is also a famous painter. I told that my family is multicultural, because my origin is very mixed: Hungarian, Rumanian, German, Dutch, Armenian and many others. I spent my childhood in the vivid, contradictory and colorful milieu of beautiful Kolozsvár, where a lot of nations and religions live together and form each other. Because of the dictatorial political system of that time my family moved to Hungary.

However I was a fashion and literature addict since my childhood, spending whole days with making hundreds and hundreds of new outfits and hairstyles for my Barbie dolls, drawing or reading novels, after finishing the high-school in a hasty moment I decided to start legal and media studies. After graduated parallel as a lawyer and finishing four years journalism, I realized that I am too mad and fashionable for a normal life, and I am more interested in fashion so I became a student of Mod’Art International Budapest fashion school. My final year at Mod’Art, I decided to start my own brand and began to work on my first collection. In February 2009 I launched my first luxury ready-to-wear women’s collection ‘CLANDESTINE’ for F/W 2009/10 including women apparels, handbags, belts, hats and gifts.

So besides handbags, I design full apparels, to need to create a really trendy and stunning appearance. Now we are working on developing the brand, so we are looking for showroom and sales opportunities.  Being environmentally conscious I do not work with ‘exotic’ leathers, only with cow, goatskin and lambskin leather and we represent an ethical manufacturing method. We use only the best quality Italian leathers and hardware combined with personalized hardware. My bags are fancy, luxury and unique, developing my ‘mercury method’, namely to be always changeable and new. I create only best quality handbags, I like interesting details, not common solutions, inspired by the contemporary metropolitan fashion trends. My target audience is the modern, trendy woman from 20 to 60, who is a fashion gourmand.

We founded our firm in summer 2008 and it took more than 8 month to launch the collection because I wished to make something special and beautiful, and we had to build up our raw material, production, modeling background. My main goal was to prove that it is possible to create same quality as the top brands. In addition I love to create handbags and I wished to learn everything about handbag creation, modeling, manufacturing etc.. Working with local dressmakers, textile industry experts I would like to believe that I made small steps to rebuild the local textile industry traditions.  We are also interested in recycling projects as well, especially in using recycled materials in luxury ready-to-wear apparels. According to this I used a special type of tulle made from recycled PET-flacons for creating a beautiful luxury skirt. In 2008 I took part in the ECOSTUME performance tour of Merlin Theatre with three outfits made from recycled materials.  At some point, I would like to make sunglasses, shoes and menswear.

I was to show a 2000 dollar handbag prototype to a business partner who loved the bag very much and then she invited me to a party. We had a very good time with her friends and we visited a lot of places at the Budapest night. The only problem with this was that I discovered next morning that the prototype had several injuries from bumping. So we had to make a second prototype because the prototype must be immaculate. So the lesson of the story is: DO NOT PARTY WITH A PROTOTYPE!
Our other design nightmare which causes headache every day is that we started a luxury ready-to-wear line in the global economical crisis when a lot of people go ‘recessionista’. However we believe that our brand will succeed and the recession will be over soon.

In the past decades Hungary had a very developed textile and leather industry, but later textile and leather industry declined and it was very hard to create a luxury line in such circumstances. We had to travel a lot abroad to find our potential partners and to develop commercial contacts. Everybody said that is absolutely impossible to achieve our goals. Than we build up from step to step the project and it was fantastic to see that we are able to launch our line and people love our designs.