The Atelier: Constanța

Constanța is a port city on the Black Sea. It is the oldest continuously inhabited city in Romania — founded as a Greek colony in the seventh century BC, built over by Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans, and then a century of industrial development that left it with the particular texture of a place that has been many things and settled into none of them. It is not a fashion city in any recognized sense. There are no showrooms. No press days. No concentration of buyers or stylists or editors who might stumble into the atelier and write something.

This is where Wicked is made.

The Space

The atelier is a working room. Not a showroom, not a content studio, not a curated space designed to be photographed for brand purposes. The dye baths are here. The laser is here. The cutting table, the sewing machines, the hardware, the samples, the failures — all of it occupies the same space, organized around the logic of production rather than the logic of presentation.

The RESHAPE lettering — three-dimensional chrome letters that appear in packaging videos and behind-the-scenes documentation — sits on the main work table. It is not a prop. It is the operating instruction for everything that happens in the room.

What Happens Here

The waterbased dye baths are prepared by hand. Temperature is monitored throughout the process. Garments enter and leave the bath in a specific sequence. The laser runs its engraving jobs, usually at night when the temperature holds steady and there is no foot traffic to introduce variables. The screen-printing press produces the box lid graphics, the garment prints, the packaging inserts — all from the same setup, all by the same hands.

Construction happens here too. The pattern blocks were developed in this room over multiple seasons. The fit testing — across multiple body types, for pieces that need to work on all of them — happens here. When something does not work, it comes back here to be resolved.

Why It Matters Where

Fashion has a complicated relationship with geography. The industry has historically used origin as a signifier of quality — Made in Italy, Made in France — and then spent decades undermining those signifiers through outsourcing while maintaining the labels. We do not use origin as a marketing claim. We use it as a description of fact: this is where the work happens, these are the people who do it, this is the city they live in.

Constanța is not on any fashion map. That is not a problem to be solved. It is simply accurate. The work comes from here. The work is what it is because of how it is made, and how it is made is inseparable from the room in which it is made.