How to cope with difficult situations and emotions in the bleak greyness of the world? The collection “Customize your character” tackles Autio’s own ways of coping with difficult situations and ways to escape them.

The collection is an ode to the vibrant mind of an imaginative child, but also a personal reflection of the designer’s own emotions and mental difficulties, and a practice in quantifying and visualizing them.

– I’ve always had these vivid fantasy worlds in my brain, and in this collection I wanted to study ways to escape into one’s own mind.

The inspirations for the collection’s looks are imaginary, protective characters, that exist in some swirly, incomprehensible state in Autio’s mind. Through research on role-playing video- and tabletop games and their ability to affect the personality of the player, as well as through studying their character-building mechanics, he brings these characters and this world from his mind to the concrete plane.

– These characters reflect me through an imaginary lens, so the inspiration for the clothing and silhouettes comes from my own personal, everyday style, but imagined in a more magical plane, like an imaginary, fantastical version of one’s own life, Autio explains.

Autio channelled the vibrancy of their thoughts and imagination into the clothes, with striking and bold patterns and details, often clashing with each other, like a random character generated in a video game. Main materials are knits in starkly different outputs, from thin and fragile, barely visible lurex knits to huge and heavy, three-dimensional crochet, made with the whims of my hand, with no thought given to the result. Old yarns and materials have also been repurposed and elevated with for example glitter and foil, adding their own stories on top of Autio’s own world.