Sara Maia

DESIGNER

Sara Maia is a Portuguese fashion designer graduated in Fashion Design from Modatex, Porto. Based in London, she has been part of creative teams at brands such as Marques’Almeida, Aitor Throup, and Maharishi. These experiences deepened her understanding of clothing as both structure and narrative. Simultaneously, she taught at Modatex, consolidating a critical and reflective approach to design. Her practice, rooted in visual research and construction, seeks new forms of expression that intersect body, memory, and gesture, exploring the potential of clothing as language. She recently completed a Master’s degree in Fashion at the Royal College of Art, London, where she expanded her research interdisciplinarily, integrating textile experimentation, image, and performance to question the boundaries of what clothing can communicate.

CONTACTS

E-mail: sara.d.c.maia@gmail.com

Friday, OCTOBER 3. 5 PM
Fashion House. By invitation only

NOTHING HAPPENED. AND YET, EVERYTHING CHANGED is a work born from a prolonged silence. A time when creation felt distant, almost impossible. For years, the urgency to feel again, to reconnect with the body, with gesture, with material, became the Designer’s path. This work is not about a specific event, but about the invisible transformation that takes place when we stop recognising who we are... and slowly begin to return. Each piece is an attempt at listening. A gesture of approaching what remained suspended. Sara Maia works with contrasts: rigidity and fluidity, opacity and transparency, structure and vulnerability, to express emotional states and internal tensions that often have no name. The garment becomes a double, both shield and revelation. A way of inhabiting the body safely, without hiding it.
Sara’s practice is rooted in observation. In detail, repetition, and care. She does not seek answers, but presences.
Echoes. Fragments of who she was, and who she is becoming again.
Above all, this work is an essay on intimate resistance. On the courage to create when everything once seemed lost.
The work is not finished, and perhaps it never will be.
But in creating it, she began to breathe again.
To remember that she is still here.
And still able to feel.