À LA RIVIERA: HOW A COLLECTION FINDS ITS NAME
THE PRESENCEThis collection was made for your moment. There are collections I start with a sketch. Others start with a feeling. This one started with you.
Not you specifically. A moment I know you know. The one that's entirely yours, in between the responsibilities, the decisions, the hundred roles you play every day with love but also with a weight that doesn't always show. That brief moment where you are not someone's anything. Just yourself. I designed this collection for that moment. I think you know exactly what I mean.
The French Riviera has always had a way of finding that woman. Not the one who goes there to be seen, though many do. The one who arrives and, without even trying, slows down. Who orders a citron pressé at a café table in Nice and actually waits for it, phone face-down, eyes up. Who wakes early in Saint-Tropez and walks the port before the yachts arrive and the day fills up, when the fishermen are still there and the light is still golden and the place still feels like it belongs to the people in it.
That is the Côte d'Azur I was thinking about when this collection came together. Not the one in the headlines. The one underneath. The terraces. The afternoons with nowhere to be. That very specific quality of ease the South of France gives you when you let it.
This collection started with the pieces themselves. And in them, immediately, I saw a direction I recognised: the warm brown of sun-baked facades in Nice, streets that smell of lavender and salt. The muted green of bougainvillea spilling over old balconies. The deep purple of a Riviera sunset. The quiet blue of the Mediterranean before the world wakes up. These weren't colours I chose at a desk. They were colours I found already there, in the pieces, the way the South of France wears them, without trying, without announcing it. From there, the question I kept asking myself was: who does she need to be, in this moment? What has she, even briefly, allowed herself to set aside? The name came last. Once I understood the mood.
Model Leonor Borges wearing Bisset Bikini and model Marta Gatinho wearing L'Eden Swimsuit
"À La Riviera is not an invitation to go somewhere. It is a reminder that your escape has always been available."
— Sofia Godinho
For the shoot, I wanted everything to feel like a place she had actually been for a while. A vintage radio on the table. An analogue camera within reach. A paperback left open, mid-thought. Objects from a slower time, that belong to a woman who knows the difference between having time and taking it.
We shot with two women. Because this moment doesn't look the same for everyone and it shouldn't. One finds it in stillness. The other in movement. Both completely present. Both completely themselves.
À La Riviera is not an invitation to go somewhere. It is a reminder that your escape has always been available. In the right piece. In the decision to wear it. In the moment, however short, where everything else can wait.
You deserve that moment. More often than you give yourself.
With love,
Sofia
Brigitte Bikini
Menton Swimsuit
