CPEIC: A design studio that combines photography, fashion and architecture

How the studio redefines terms and applications to change the rules we dress our daily life with.

DS.WRITER:

Σοφία Θρουβάλα

Image: ‘Nostalgia’, CPEIC objects | Photos by CPEIC studio

CPEIC is a studio in Cyprus that combines architecture with fashion and photography. The founder is Tereza Kourra, an architect and photographer, who after studying in Thessaloniki, settled and worked in London. In 2020, after she returned to Cyprus, she founded the studio in the heart of the capital.

CPEIC studio proposes a new outlook which attempts to link design, through photography as documentation and expression but also through design itself, with other fields like that of fashion design. Through a kaleidoscopic philosophy, the studio recommends its own limited edition brand resulting from systematic designing, which, having a visual as well as a physical-experienced effect through photography, proposes collectable objects that infiltrate the world of fashion. These objects can be concentrated under the umbrella title “CPEIC objects”, creating a “library” with pieces that are limited because of their bespoke character.

According to the brand’s philosophy, fashion is more than objects, since they carry a code of communication that penetrates everyday life and somewhat dictates our image and how society perceives us. Scale, materials, creative process and communication of the final image, terms that mostly apply to architecture or design, constitute a guide for Tereza’s design vision, since, at the end, these qualities also apply to clothes and accessories design. At this point, fashion meets architecture, and architecture meets photography and communication marketing.

Structural and functional design, methods used in architecture, are of great interest to the brand as it aims to redefine terms and applications to change the rules we dress our daily life with. Moreover, studio CPEIC, through its brand, is interested in promoting experimentation with materials that can substitute leather, for example, thus leaving a smaller ecological footprint.

Tereza’s circle of collaborators is characterised by a tendency for evolving continuously and exploration. Even though CPEIC is a space run mainly by her, at the same time she strives to collaborate with professionals from different fields, branches and spaces, each one of them offering something personal. The Studio aims to evolve and expand through interdisciplinarity and creative exchange, thus exploring more and more ways of expressing and applying architecture to the spectrum of daily life. So, since 2021, the studio has been proposing a primary idea concerning furniture design, titled Wireframing Mechanisms, going beyond fashion and jewellery, while also maintaining its minimal aesthetic through the use of white metal and rough lines, a fact that perhaps signals a general turn of the Studio towards private space.