Hungarian-Romanian fashion designer Olah Gyarfas’ Miercurea-Ciuc based studio is warm and austere at the same time, with chocolate brown walls and massive wood benches and tables. Old frames, paintings, white porcelain pieces and furs are scattered around, while his huge working table stacked with maniacally ordered objects, occupies a prominent position. It’s from this studio that Gyarfas works on the collections for the Romanian up-market fashion label Rozalb de Mura that he founded at the beginning of 2006 together with Rita Ferencz Lenke and a creative-marketing team.
The label is actually conceived by its creators as a multidisciplinary platform that supports collaborations between fashion designers, visual artists, musicians and writers of various nationalities. Rozalb de Mura’s collections were often presented through art performances and installations. A few months ago, the label was also commissioned by the curators of the Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art a tote bag to carry the exhibition catalogues.
So far, Rozalb de Mura has produced some interesting collections. One of its first women and menswear collections featured jackets in high-tech fabrics and shiny, eccentric fibres juxtaposed to more classical textures such as wool and cashmere. 
The Spring/Summer 08 collection was characterised by neutral tones, hyperbolical collars inspired by the traditional costumes of the Ciuc area combined with modern Western culture and obsessive slash-cuts that appeared on many pieces, either functionally – in the form of pockets – or in a simply cruelly decorative manner. At times it’s just a colour, a pattern or a texture that haunts Gyarfas and inspires him, as it happened with the Autumn/Winter 2008-09 collection. Entitled “The Thing” and inspired by the textures of ancient lava, the collection is entirely black, as if each piece had been immersed in a thick, oil-based liquid. All the outfits have a futuristic cut and a strange sculptural quality about them.
Among Rozalb de Mura’s most recent fans there is also Sabina Sciubba from the Brazilian Girls who wore one of the label’s outfits from the Spring/Summer 09 collection during a few gigs the band did in the States in the past few weeks. The Romanian label will soon work on a video with the New York-based band, while one of Rozalb de Mura’s drawings will be featured in a limited edition art book that will accompany the forthcoming remix album "Morphica" by experimental musician Mikhail Karikis.
At present Rozalb de Mura is distributed in Berlin, New York, Copenhagen and Zurich, and it will soon be available in London from TwoSee. If you’re in London in September try not to miss Rozalb de Mura’s showcase at On-Off . In the meantime, to know more about Gyarfas, his inspirations and style, you can read my interview with him on Dazed Digital.
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