Fashionable dialogue with Oni Roman

Atlanta may not be a fashion mecca, but it has its own voice, its own flair, and its own personality. Enter Onisha Isabel Román Espada, the entrepreneur and garment engineer for the Atlanta born-and-bred brand Fresh.i.Am. In her well-lit mad-scientist clothing lab, hidden in the back of the crisp monochromatic Fresh.i.Am store, Oni sat on a recent workday measuring and cutting a garment as if on autopilot. A military brat born in Puerto Rico, she hopped around Europe and the States until her family settled in Georgia when she was 8. Atlanta pretty much raised her.

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She started simply with hand sewing at a young age with her abuela, and she didn’t really take fashion design seriously until college at American University London, when she fell in love with costume design. She was creating things people had never seen before and that gave her the high to create more. She heard it was hard to make money as an artist, so she changed her fate by making wearable art sculptures with textile as the medium.

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Today Oni’s zero-fucks-given attitude is contagious and straight-up inspiring. There is surely no one better to kick-start a dialogue about the state of Atlanta’s style and how it can position itself to level up.

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Why do you — and Fresh.i.Am collectively — call Atlanta home?

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We call Atlanta home because we all ended up here and it just made sense because the cost of living made sense. Being here has allowed us to develop without having to compromise our cost of living. We can work here and still travel wherever we want.

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Are you inspired by Atlanta?

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No, not really. I travel a lot and basically live online. It’s like my perspective isn’t here; I’m an anomaly. I often go online to look for inspiration. Atlanta is full of talent and I do want people to know that. But when I go out, like out of town, people freak out and want to know where we’re from. They can never believe I’m from Atlanta.

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What inspires your style?

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Japanese street style, London street style, anime, visually striking movies like Stanley Kubrick movies, costumes from The Fall by Tarsem Singh, period pieces, military uniforms.

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Who are your fashion icons of Atlanta?

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Speakerfoxxx, Bosco, Ashley Rhoden, the Fresh.i.Am guys Deng, Tunde, and C-Will, Nessa [[http://www.bazaarbohemian.com/|the Bazaar Bohemian]], and Corey Davis.

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Tell me a little about your process and what you do.

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Tunde Ogunnoiki, my business partner, does the 2-D renderings, photography, and creative direction. He designs the collections and I’m the one making them. So he will do main design and I will go in and edit it with knowledge of textiles and materials. I also like doing alterations for my friends and when I have the time, I work on my own line, Body Politik.

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What makes Fresh.i.Am, for lack of a better term, so fresh?

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The versatility of what I’m working with is the best part. We make our own textiles — for instance, the letters for the hats is a felting process that we developed and do in house. I get to work with dye and wash techniques and do a lot of textile manipulation.

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What are your favorite ways to work with textiles?

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I call it production porn — where you can drool over a perfect seam and stitch laughs. I like a lot of deconstruction, raw edges, textures, making sure that seams and stitches are nice and crisp. I also like different materials and accessories — like secret pockets or a holster — to be both cool and utilitarian.

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No joke, Fresh.i.Am is big in Japan. How’d that happen?

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The “big in Japan” thing came from online sales. Atlanta didn’t fuck with us much, so we had to sell outside of Atlanta. Once we put our stuff online, Asia got interested and we’re popular there. In fact, I think our first order was in Greenland or something obscure. We also got snubbed by Wish, which was a blessing in disguise because we ended up opening our own retail shop in our Old Fourth Ward’s studio’s hallway for the holidays, and it ended up working. So we kept it.

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What’s right with Atlanta style?

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Atlanta has got some things right, whether or not they hit the mark. Sometimes you drive to the south side and see interesting hairstyles and clothing combos. Like the ripping of shirts is creative and fun. As far as having it be more polished or refined, I think lately it has been maturing. But I think that had something to do with this perception of Atlanta being such a black city. There was a very strong opinion about what it meant to embody that identity, like using certain words or dressing a certain way could revoke your “black card.” People got timid and stepped out of it. We’re just doing our thing and not giving any fucks.

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SCAD’s fashion department has helped bring in kids that are fashionable and help Atlanta come back into that conversation. Lately I’ve been seeing more guys having fun. Do you think people take risks here?

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Nah, not many risk takers. Here in the Old Fourth Ward, it’s mostly young kids with old money, like a refined classic normcore. More of a polished uniform, no uniqueness.

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What do you think we are missing?

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We don’t have a publication that’s focused on all of this. There isn’t much of a fashion conversation going on at all. There are a few bloggers that are trying to capture it, but it’s not representing every pocket.

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And nobody is showcasing the club kids, the gays, all the serious fashion people. There really is a lot of style and it should be highlighted, we just don’t have the demand for it. Is there a solution?

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I’d love to see a real fashion week here, more reputable publications and businesses. Having more events that bring people together, more publications, having Atlanta take itself seriously.