This story originally appears in i-D 374, The Unknown Issue. Get your copy now.
text STEFF YOTKA
photography BRANKA NEVES
Paride Maria Calvia, alias Branka Neves, has been documenting the denizens of North London for over 10 years, discovering a freaky fabulous kind of style far outside the world of “fashion.”
Operating under numerous aliases (including @vanillajellaba, the name under which he once styled at-home high-fashion looks), Calvia photographs the city’s most interesting people—and their even more interesting outfits—around his flat and the Kiko Kostadinov office, where he works as one of the earliest employees of the brand. Seen in his limited-edition books and here in i-D, Calvia’s anthropological study of the head-turning style of local pedestrians acts as a counter to traditional fashion reportage.
I started photographing people on the street . . . round 12 years ago, unconsciously, and it became a compulsion to document them in the past 10. It was never an artistic endeavour to begin with. I just have a tendency to get obsessed with things.
I shoot around . . . London’s Wood Green, Dalston, Bow, and Edgware Road mainly. Sometimes it’s for hours, sometimes 10 minutes.
What catches my eye is . . . anything from a hairstyle, to proportions, to attitude, to general coordination. Styles have changed, but what feeds the obsession is mostly the singularity and effortlessness of unique characters.
Making books is . . . something I owe to Conor Donlon, of Donlon Books in London (one of my favourite bookstores). He pushed me to start publishing at the beginning. In the last few years, I’ve been collecting used photo albums that I fill with one-off prints of the photos I take.
There’s nothing quite like . . . the personal coordination of those I’m lucky to come across on the street, unaware of where fashion stems from most of the time.
The most stylish person I know is . . . his beautiful woman in her 50s or 60s with a scruffy dog that I stumble upon quite often on Andrews Road.
I use “Branka Neves,” not Paride Maria Calvia . . . because there should not be any interest towards the person behind it. You should just be able to engage with the shots singularly or in their entirety and hopefully draw on some-thing meaningful or not.
