OLLY AWAKE’s new collection, Healing and Structure, is set to launch at the end of September, K Terry Smith, founder of OLLY AWAKE, said. Photo credit: courtesy of K Terry Smith
As summer comes to an end, Columbus-based, gender-neutral design company OLLY AWAKE prepares to launch a new collection.
OLLY AWAKE made its fashion debut with The Arrival Collection in the fall of 2017 at the Fashion Meets Music Festival after founder K Terry Smith and co-founder and head of design Celeste Malvar-Stewart began working together on an initial concept line, Smith said.
“I had come to Celeste wanting to address what I felt was a need within the fashion world, which is creating fashion that is intentionally designed to really be in between what exists today — between menswear and womenswear,” Smith said. “Really something that not only just caters to a market that we both felt was expanding, but also really opens up new pathways for expression.”
OLLY AWAKE’s new collection, Healing and Structure, is set to launch at the end of September, Smith said. Healing and Structure features five pieces, some of which they said are elevated and reimagined pieces from its first collection.
“I think the brand has evolved from when we really first launched it,” Malvar-Stewart said. “We were just almost like a couple of kids just trying to create something that we felt was really needed in society and we were, even then, focusing on inclusivity and accessibility.”
Smith said OLLY AWAKE’s approach to fashion is making the world a better place through design. That means not only making the clothing financially accessible, but also ethically made, using renewable fibers and sustainably sourced textiles, they said.
“For us, we wanted to hone in on, like, ‘How can we do four or five designs in every possible size in a sustainable, attainable, ethical, well-made way, in a really commercialized way,’” Smith said. “All of the production itself uses ethical labor — actually it’s local labor — so, you know, folks really know where their clothes come from.”
When designing the pieces for Healing and Structure, Malvar-Stewart said it wasn’t about making clothes that as many people as possible could wear; rather, it was about experiencing the clothing and how empowering fashion could be.
Smith said they wanted to create a place where clothing isn’t something people feel they have to fit into in order to fit in with what society expects of them.
“We have one design in this collection that we’re launching, and it’s a major piece, and we’ve had several people try it on,” Malvar-Stewart said. “They all would put this piece on and feel something really powerful. Like, they’d say, ‘I feel sexy, I feel classy, I feel beautiful.’ And I find that, just personally as a designer, really, really rewarding.”
Smith and Malvar-Stewart said they were able to take much-needed time during the pandemic to grow and develop the OLLY AWAKE brand, determine next steps and continue working to give their customers what they wanted.
“We kind of needed that time to do that because we were creating what we thought people would want and what was inclusive and what might make people feel included and safe,” Malvar-Stewart said. “But I think now with this collection, we really hit it on the nose. I think we’ve really listened to our customers and we’ve hit really well with truly being inclusive, not just with sizing, but with the designs themselves and then making them accessible.”
The sizing system for OLLY AWAKE was completely reimagined for the launch of the Healing and Structure collection, Smith said. Featuring new label icons designed by Katria Judkins, rather than typical size numbers, the sizing system starts with Crescent Moon — which first launched in 2019 — and includes Rising Sun, Seeing Eye, Stars at Night, Rolling Tide and Shooting Star, they said.
Leaning into the new sizing line as part of the expansion for the collection was something that felt right, Malvar-Stewart said, spotlighting the fact that size is arbitrary.
“We’ve just been so conditioned with sizing and truly it’s an arbitrary thing,” Malvar-Stewart said. “We should own our size and our body types and all of that. We’re not given that opportunity with most brands.”
Smith said the Healing and Structure collection will launch in a virtual format at the end of September. More information about the sizing system and updates about the launch can be found on OLLY AWAKE’s Instagram and Facebook pages.
