EXCLUSIVE: Getting To Know Dimitris Strepkos Better

 Dimitris

 Dimitris and Eleni

 Dimitris, Eleni and their girls!


Dimitris Strepkos and Eleni Barla are the successful duet that invented the brand "Celebrity Skin".
Let's get to know Dimitris Strepkos better through this short "blog-interview"...

• You and Eleni Barla have created the successful brand "Celebrity Skin". How did you come up with that name?  We consider clothes as our own skin. So...we had already in mind the second component of our label. The first component "Celebrity" derived from Greek people's endless passion for logos (logomania). "Celebrity Skin" is a wonderful tag line. You can think of it as "Celebrity Skin" or as "Celebrities Skin", either way.

• You have many years of successful career in the fashion industry. Do you consider yourself more as an art director, a fashion editor or a fashion designer? I love the image in general, I love theater, I love art more than anything else. So...I am an image maker and I express that through the clothes that I design.

• Do you have a mentor? No, I don't have a mentor.

• Where do you draw inspiration for your designs? My mentors are the films that I watch, the editorials that I browse, the several art exhibitions that I visit,  people's everyday lives that incredibly inspire me. You can actually draw inspiration out of anything.

• What's your philosophy of life, in one phrase? DARE TO WEAR.

• What's the biggest challenge  of your job? Trying to create clothes that actually have an identity, without loosing any of our fantasy and without making any discounts to the quality of the materials used. We want to have identity.

• You won the Best Designer Prize in this year's Athens Xclusive Designers Week. How does that feel? We won two prizes: the Best New Designer and the Best Catwalk prize, and we were deeply touched because the prizes we given to us by the President of Monaco's Fashion Week. It's really nice and moving to be acknowledged by people of your field that you truly appreciate.

• Your new collection is called "Cemetery Purity". Tell me more about that... Me and Eleni, who I consider as my own "child" and my "right hand", we decided to experiment with white color. This is something new to us, because avant-garde designers as we are, we were always identified by black and grey colors. So, Celebrity Skin meets white color as well as heterogeneous materials. We want to succeed  clearness and purity for all our clothes.

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer to my questions! Wishing you the best! Huge fan of yours!xxx