Since 2012, I knew that my dream was to start a clothing brand that felt like an amalgamation of all of the things that I loved: music, art, poetry, street style, and alternative fashion. Once adulthood came around, poetry, art and music became a way to express the hardships of an existence that had seemingly been plagued with unluckiness and despair from jump. There were many moments in time since 2012 when I felt that I was in the position to start the brand that I had been dreaming of since I was just a kid, but there was always something missing.
I could never figure out what the message was - if this brand was going to be my legacy, what the hell was it supposed to all mean? I could never justify starting a business just for the sake of doing it, plagued with the desire to assign meaning to everything, I needed a reason outside of myself and my own dreams. My own tortured existence became harder and harder to stomach until things finally came to a head. In a conversation about feeling like life was a curse, someone said these fated words to me: "the only way to kill a curse is to talk about it," and that's when I realized that it wasn't a brand message that I was missing, it was a purpose.
The purpose of Curse Count isn't to dwell, but rather to count up your curses and wear them on your sleeve; I may be cursed, but I'm not the only one and in doing so, I'll kill my curses one by one.
Many of these pieces have quotes from, or artwork inspired by poetry I've written over the past decade. The goal wasn't to try and shove another streetwear or alternative fashion brand down the throats of people who are already suffering from a deteriorating economy, but rather to create wearable art out of the words I've been scribbling in my journal during what felt like a lifetime of isolation and hopelessness. I hope you can assign your own meaning to the words and images you'll find and wear them as proudly as I will.
Our ethos is simple yet profound: the only way to kill a curse is to talk about it. We invite you to count up your curses, to wear them not as shackles of shame but as badges of resilience, symbols of your indomitable spirit. For within the embrace of community, within the sanctuary of shared experience, curses lose their power to define us and instead become catalysts for growth, for transformation, for redemption.
Curse Count is a representation of everything that makes us human, a reminder that the ability to feel those things that nag at us in the dark is how we know we're still alive.
Life's A Curse (but that's okay).
- Autumn; founder of Curse Count.