Express Yourself
Designer Clare Vivier On How To Make A Statement With Adobe Express
The style star behind Clare V. shares her best kept secrets, including her custom templates designed in partnership with Adobe Express.
Much like any artistic medium, style is a form of communication. It serves as a conduit for sharing our inspirations, dreams, raw talents, and – for designer Clare Vivier – our ideas about the world around us. Pulling from design cues of the past, social and political movements, as well as her own intuition, Vivier’s apparel and accessories line, Clare V., often combines structured basics with more playful colors, prints, and textures to create a brand that’s uniquely her own.
For Vivier, her earliest memories of fashion came from her mother’s closet. “I loved going deep inside the closet and finding the special dresses she hardly ever wore. I would try them on and swan around the house,” she explains. “ I would put on her slips and go out and ride my Big Wheel down the block. I remember thinking that people would think I was very glamorous.”
From there, Vivier realized the transformative power of great clothes and accessories, using her own style blog as a way to kick start what would eventually grow to become her brand. “I realized people were hungry for an inside look at all things style and what I was sharing—and wearing—quickly resonated with everyone who was following along.”
Bustle recently chatted with Vivier about her career, her inspiration, and why Adobe Express is the must-have, easy-to-use tool for anyone trying to make a splash in the world of design.
Look For Inspiration Everywhere
A range of inspirations inform Vivier’s design process, with plenty of artistic elements thrown into the mix to create everything from handbags to dresses and everything in between. “I work with an incredible team that helps bring our designs to life,” she said, adding that the designs are produced locally in Los Angeles which allows her team to be involved from beginning to end. Take one look at any of Vivier’s custom Adobe Express templates, and it’s easy to see her inspiration and how creatively attuned she is to the world around her. “It seems unconventional, but I love taking inspiration from hand-painted graphics I see on buildings and on the street as I’m walking or driving by, giving us ideas for fonts, colors, and shapes to use in our prints and designs.”
Find The Right Tools To Express Yourself
Tools like Adobe Express are instrumental in helping Vivier tell the story she wants to tell with her brand, from her design process, to website building, to email and social media marketing – tasks she managed on her own in the past. Recently, Vivier partnered with Adobe and Meta on their Express Your Brand series – where she offers free training sessions on how to build your brand on social media as well as unique templates in her signature aesthetic for those looking to quickly and easily customize ready-to-share templates for their business or brand. “I would have loved to have had a tool like Adobe Express when I was starting my brand,” she explains. “The ease and speed of what Adobe Express offers emerging designers allows them to use that time elsewhere, like expressing their creativity and working to build their brand and watch it grow.”
To help make sharing across social media easier, Vivier worked with Adobe Express to create vibrant templates that speak to her brand’s whimsy and inclusivity. With bright primary colors, irregular shapes, and bold textures, they serve as the perfect backdrop for her designs and signature brand voice.
Tell A Story
Storytelling is an important thread that carries through Vivier’s brand, blending fashion and politics to shed light on values that continue to inspire the designer like equality, opportunity, and justice for all. According to Vivier, growing up in a socially conscious family pushed her to use her brand as more than just a fashion statement. “We’ve partnered with some incredibly important organizations in creating products that give back to their efforts,” she explains. “We always take into account the current social climate in creating the partnerships we do, which has helped drive our activism.”
As one may expect from a brand whose core values center around justice, Vivier has also been a vocal proponent of promoting sustainability around her products. Her recently launched Le Resale is a peer-to-peer marketplace where new and old customers alike can buy and sell pre-loved designs, giving each piece a second, or even third, life. “I'm a devoted vintage shopper, so it immediately made a lot of sense to me to create a venue where Clare V. customers can resell their pre-loved items to other fans of the brand — I love the circularity of it,” she explains about how the idea came to life. “So much of resale is out of a brand’s control that we decided to do what we could to bring the resale process directly to our customers so we could control the level of quality our customers were getting, and create an experience that felt right to us...and our customers.”
No matter what story you are trying – whether connecting with customers and highlighting priority products – it’s never been easier to communicate a beautiful statement than with Adobe Express.
