Hey guys, Mickey Novak here for Young Hollywood. It is a party at opening ceremony. We are here to celebrate the fabulous collection called Studio 189 and it is by Rosario Dawson and her partner, Apremau. I'm here with Apremau, who's looking amazing.

Thank you.

Are you head to toe in Studio 189?

Head to toe in Studio 189. I love it. Very excited. The energy in here and I don't know if it's the colorful clothes, but it's incredible.

So good. It's everything. Yeah. Opening Ceremony's been really amazing.

So you and Rosario know each other from New York.

Yeah, New York. So tell me about sort of the start of this company. So, I worked for fashion for a really long time and I've always really wanted to do something that had a bigger purpose. And Rosario's really amazing because social impact is at the fundament of who she is. A few years ago, she invited me to the Congo to this amazing trip that changed my life. Um, and that's when we kind of made the decision to do something together because we really saw the cycle of sustainability. Each piece is handmade and there's a lot that goes into it, the placement of the prince, each piece is hand-batiked, hand-carved, there's a lot of work that goes into it and it's a beautiful process and we really love this traditional West African symbol. That means help me, let me help you because that's how we work. It's about collaborating, working together all the way through to where we are today with the consumer. We're really there. I mean, we're on the ground, we're doing it. We spent a lot of time with our communities, we work with women, we work with the United Nations Ethical Fashion Initiative. Rosario had seen this beautiful film called Crimson Wings, it was inspired by these beautiful flamingos in Kenya. So there's a lot of that, water colors, blue indigos coming from Mali, but inspired by the blue sea. It's really beautiful.

I was gonna ask you because the flamingo is my spirit animal. What is yours?

Yeah. Oh mine, god. I don't even know. I'm not really sure. I'm gonna take elephant because I know that's Rosario's. So that way you can't ask her that question.

No, that's okay. My spirit animal are kids who sing death metal. There, I know you guys are so hands on with the designing, with you know, giving back to women and this mission, it's more than just clothing. And that's a really important thing. Like we're working in communities in Sierra Leone, giving them an opportunity to amplify the work that they're already doing and together all of us in partnership are doing something that none of us could do on our own.

You guys just show us sort of some of the pieces because I know you do, you do jewelry. I'm looking at like seamless underwear over there. I'm looking.

Let's start with the underwear. We have a lot of partners that we work with and on one of them is a friend of mine, Renaldo Black, who I met at Burning Man actually. She calls the panty empowered by you and the panties all contribute to microlones for women in different countries. She's never been in Ghana before. And so she collaborated with us. What I love specifically about this is that those donations have already gone. Those women already have that money. I think that's really powerful. Oh, this is inspired by the flamingos. I was gonna say, this is definitely me. We see when you see you actually look at the lookbook, we made it really specific to be male, female. And we really tried to design a lot of the pieces to be something that you could share a suitcase with and travel together and him and her would both be very happy. And it's all hand-batiked. So every single dot, line, stripe, this has been dipped in hot wax, redyed over and over again, then boiled to take the wax off. So there's so much detail that's gone into this. So for me, you know you were saying how happy we seem and I'm like ecstatic because we're two years old now. We've been taking, you know, they say in Sierra Leone small, small, we took our time, we identified the communities we wanted to work with, we figured out the challenges that we had to overcome, and we kept building up that trust, working on the collections, getting it to this point. And to see people wearing it now and it's out and it's unbelievable, you know.

Thank you so much for the chat. Thanks for sharing the your line with us.

Absolutely.

Have a great night, go party.