Atelier Brut is a newish street label out of Bucharest, Romania, that seems to revel in scrappy impropriety. Designer Andrei Dinu cobbles together deliberately chintzy sweaters and shirts (130-140 euros) — and a strange necklace hybrid of rosary beads and ID cards — from recovered bits of upholstery and needlepoint embroidery that’s common in Romania. He also repurposes furniture in a way that melds old and new — a collision of jarring styles in one piece.

Recently Dinu has begun experimenting with financial ticker symbols. “Since techno-capital is a foreign, unknowable entity anyway,” he says, “high finance aesthetics might as well be used as abstract decoration.” The result is not just another reproduction of Tumblr aesthetics, he notes, but genderless, placeless, timeless pieces that are nonetheless one-of-a-kind.

This video, with its discomfiting portrayal of languid Romanian slackers, goes a long way in explaining the Atelier Brut ethos…

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