HACOY - Maximilian Rupp on Munich Fashion and Comfort

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Inside HACOY
the Munich Brand Shaping Comfort with Restraint

Fashion has learned to keep desire slightly unfinished. A new season, a new cart, a new reason to feel almost complete. HACOY enters that cycle with a quieter proposition, shaped around what founder Maximilian Rupp calls “a sense of enough.” Founded in Munich, with Romana Tricoli leading the design side, the brand looks at clothing through contact, habit and restraint, from silk underwear and a unisex cupro pajama to swimwear and bamboo T-shirts made for the city that first gave the project its pace.

The focus sits close to the body, where a garment has very little space to pretend. A waistband, a seam, a collar, fabric after several hours of wear. These are small decisions, but they determine whether comfort remains an idea or becomes something lived with. HACOY develops its pieces with long-term manufacturing partners in Italy and Lithuania, where material, fit, production realities and responsibility enter the process early, before a garment can become part of the range.

In conversation with LE MILE, Rupp speaks about refusal, everyday desire, material honesty and the discipline required to let a young independent brand grow from one city without outgrowing the restraint it was built on.

LE MILE
HACOY seems to begin with a simple promise: clothing should make daily life feel less loud, less forced and less disposable. What did you feel was missing in fashion before you started building the brand?

Maximilian Rupp
A sense of enough. Most of the industry is built to keep you slightly dissatisfied, because that is what makes you buy the next thing. I wanted clothes that do the opposite, clothes that you stop thinking about once you own them. What was missing, for me, was restraint. Pieces that don't perform, don't shout, and don't expire in your head after one season.

What has "Better, not more" already made you refuse?

Discounts, for one. We don't do sales, and we've turned down the big seasonal sale events even when the maths looked good, because a brand that is "better, not more" can't also be "40% off." We've passed on collaborations that would have given us reach but not meaning, and on expanding the range just to have more to show. The hardest refusals are the reasonable-sounding ones: another drop, another category, another channel. Most of them I say no to.

Where does comfort usually fail in a garment?

At the points of contact. The waistband, the collar, the seam against the skin, the label that scratches after an hour. Comfort fails when it is treated as something you add at the end, after the look is decided. The body is honest about it. It just takes a few hours to tell you.

HACOY is currently focusing on silk underwear, a unisex cupro pajama and swimwear, all categories that sit close to the body and private daily routines. Why did this intimate layer of dressing feel like the right place to move into now?

Because if "less loud" is going to mean anything, it has to start where no one is watching. These are the clothes for waking up, resting, being alone. There is nothing to hide behind: no styling, no occasion, no audience. You can't fake quality in a piece that is only ever experienced privately. That felt like the most honest place to be.

Romana Tricoli leads the design side, while you shape the broader system around it. Where do strategy and design have to agree before a garment can move forward?

On whether the piece earns its place. Romana can take an idea further than I can on the design side. My job is to hold the constraints: the material, the price it can honestly carry, whether we can make it the way we say we make things. We have to agree on the why before the what. If a piece is beautiful but we can't produce it responsibly, it doesn't move. If it is responsible but says nothing, same answer. The agreement is almost always about restraint.

You studied business psychology and fashion brand management, which is an unusual combination for a founder working with clothing so closely tied to feeling and routine. What did that attention to human behavior teach you about fashion?

That almost no one buys clothes rationally. People buy a feeling, and a small story about who they are. You can exploit that or you can respect it. I chose to design for the everyday self rather than the aspirational one, the person getting dressed on an ordinary Tuesday, not the imagined version of them. Behavior also taught me that habit beats novelty. The pieces people actually love are the ones they reach for without deciding to.

HACOY
portrait of founder Maximilian Rupp

When does function become more important than material purity?

When purity would fail the person wearing it. A "purer" fiber that pills, shrinks, or falls apart in two years is not the responsible choice just because it sounds clean. The material is a means, not the point. If a considered blend lasts ten years and a single fiber lasts two, the blend is the more sustainable garment. I would rather be honest about that than perform purity.

HACOY works with long-term manufacturing partners in Italy and Lithuania, giving the brand a concrete European production geography. What did these partners change about your original idea of the brand?

They made it slower and more honest. I came in with an idea of the brand. They taught me the reality of making: minimums, lead times, what a fabric will actually do, what is genuinely possible. You can't bluff your way through a workshop. Working with the same people over years turns production from a transaction into a relationship, and that changes what you are willing to put your name on.

"Hyper local, global" begins with one city first, not a global rollout. What becomes clearer when a brand grows from a place instead of from a market plan?

Who it is actually for. The idea is local hubs, city by city, where over time each city produces its own clothing rather than everything flowing out of a single source. Italy is where we hold the standard today, but it is a starting point, not a permanent anchor. The longer goal is production that lives where the people who wear it live. When you grow from a place, you have real people and real context giving you feedback, not an abstract target group on a slide. A market plan tells you where the demand should be. A city tells you who is actually showing up, and what they actually need. The second one is harder to argue with.

The new bamboo T-shirts are planned as a Munich-only launch, which makes locality part of the product itself. What has to happen for a garment to feel connected to a city without turning into merchandise?

Merchandise is when you print the city's name on a shirt and call it belonging. Connection is when the city actually shaped the thing: where it is made, who tried it first, the fact that it exists at this scale because of this place. It has to come from a real constraint and a real relationship, not a graphic. If you removed the word "Munich" entirely and it still felt of Munich, you have done it right.

Alongside the brand, you work on MAR, your personal painting practice. What kind of space does MAR give you, and what can it hold that would become too private inside a fashion brand?

MAR has no brief and no customer. Nothing has to be useful, coherent, or finished. It can hold doubt and mess, the things that don't resolve, which a brand is not allowed to show. HACOY has to be legible to other people. MAR doesn't have to be legible to anyone, including me. I need both, and I think they protect each other.

You mentioned ADHD and mental health as subjects you care about. Has that influenced how you build a working environment around the brand?

Yes. I've tried to build the brand around how I actually work rather than how I am supposed to. That means fewer, deeper focuses instead of many shallow ones, being honest about capacity, and a structure that bends rather than punishes. I am not interested in a culture that treats a different kind of attention as a flaw to be managed. If anything, the way my mind works is part of why HACOY looks the way it does.

Fashion still depends on real bodies, real fabric and people making decisions together. How do you prevent AI from making an independent brand look larger or smoother than it really is?

By using it for the work, not the front. I run a lot of the brand alone, and AI lets one person do what used to take a team. But the temptation is to use that to look bigger and more polished than we are. I try not to. A startup magazine once decided not to feature us because they assumed we were already a big company. I took it as a compliment, because at most we are three people. It told me the work was landing, but it also reminded me how easily the surface can outrun the truth. So the decisions that matter stay human, the texture stays human, and the brand is allowed to look exactly as small and handmade as it is. The danger is not the tool. It is letting the surface outrun the substance.

If HACOY's first phase is about proving the model in Munich, what would tell you that the brand is ready for another city?

Pull instead of push. Not a single revenue number, but the quieter signs: people coming back, rewearing, telling other people without being asked, a community that holds together when I am not actively feeding it. The day the model runs in Munich without me pushing on it constantly, and there is genuine demand coming from somewhere else, that is the signal. Until then, moving would just be ambition pretending to be readiness.


— Explore the Full Collection at www.hacoy.com
all images HACOY Press

Clothing in Use - The Language of Maara Studio

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Where Colour Holds
Maara Studio by Izabela Barbaric

written LE MILE

Maara Studio takes shape through a way of working that stays close to the garment itself and to how it is worn. Founded by Izabela Barbaric, the label develops through decisions that remain tied to the piece rather than building a fixed vocabulary.

Maara Studio

Maara Studio

Colour enters the collections with a clarity rooted in presence. It holds the garment in place, allowing it to register immediately while remaining connected to the body wearing it. The effect is direct, with a controlled sense of staging.

A similar precision runs through the way garments are imagined in relation to specific people. Many pieces are connected to women from Barbaric’s own circle, as a way of thinking through posture, gesture and how a piece is carried. This thinking informs proportion, material and colour at a level that remains embedded in the garment itself, without resolving into fixed characters or narratives.

Material and production follow these conditions, with small editions produced through Italian ateliers keeping the process close to the object so adjustments remain traceable and decisions do not disappear in scale. Fabrics such as silk, cotton and linen are selected for how they respond in wear, how they hold shape without fixing it, and how they shift over time. What emerges is a way of approaching femininity that does not need to be defined in advance. It takes shape through use and through how a garment holds together while being worn. In the following conversation, Izabela Barbaric speaks about how this approach developed and how it continues to inform Maara Studio.

Maara Studio

Maara Studio

Maara Studio

LE MILE
When did your design language reach a point where it needed its own label? Was there a decisive moment, or did that step take shape gradually? And how closely is that founding impulse tied to the assured femininity your work expresses today?

Izabela Barbaric
The desire was there from an early age. As a child, I used to flip through catalogues and magazines and knew I wanted to be part of that world. At first, I took a different path, worked, gained experience, and saw a lot, but something creative was always missing.
During the pandemic, that thought became more concrete. The turning point came in a conversation with a friend who simply asked why I wasn’t doing it. I didn’t have an answer. In that moment, I realised there was no real reason not to, so I started. Confident femininity was never a concept to me, it was always a feeling. For me, it is less about an external image and more about an inner attitude: taking space, being present, and not adapting.
Over time, that feeling became more defined through the process itself, through making decisions, but also through moments of uncertainty. That attitude was always there, but it only became tangible through building my own label.

Looking back at your earlier years — before Maara existed — what did you believe fashion could give you that it perhaps couldn’t at the time? And has that belief changed?

Fashion has always been a way for me to express mood and personality. It is about feeling comfortable, moving freely, and dressing intuitively rather than according to expectations.
That sense of freedom is still at the core of my work today. If anything, it has become even stronger.

Colour plays a central role in your collections. It feels deliberate, almost defiant in its openness. What does that luminosity mean to you beyond its immediate visual impact?

Colour represents joy to me, but it is also a statement. It expresses presence, confidence, and a certain independence from the need to conform. Colour always carries an attitude. At the same time, it is a form of communication. It influences how a look is perceived, the mood it carries, and how present it feels.
Sometimes colour is an intuitive decision, sometimes it is used more consciously to create contrast or a sense of calm. It also helps structure my collections by creating connections or, in some cases, intentional breaks.

Much of contemporary fashion operates through irony or conceptual distance. Against that backdrop, Maara feels direct and sensual. Is that a conscious choice? And what does that directness allow you to express that might otherwise get lost?

Yes. I believe in honesty in expression. Clothing should connect and evoke something without needing explanation. That directness makes it accessible, while still remaining deeply personal.

Maara Studio
portrait of designer and founder Izabela Barbaric

Maara Studio

Who do you design for? And how does that presence — real or imagined — influence the way a piece takes shape?

I design for individuals. I often have a friend or an important woman in my life in mind, her presence, her way of living, the way she presents herself, how she wears colour, and how she wants to be perceived. Clothing should enhance that personality, not overshadow it. It is about presence, confidence, and a sense of joy.
This idea directly shapes my designs, especially in terms of silhouette and proportion. Colour and material also come from this, because each piece needs to adapt to the person, not the other way around.

When you design, how consciously are you thinking about the body? Is movement something you construct deliberately, or does it emerge intuitively as the piece develops?

The feeling on the body is essential. A piece needs to feel natural and move with the wearer. When that works, everything else follows almost automatically. I think about the body and movement very early in the process. It is not something that comes at the end, it accompanies the design from the beginning. There is always a moment where I test how a piece falls, how it moves, and whether it supports the body or restricts it. Many decisions are made at that point.

Several of your pieces carry the names of women from your own circle. What shifts in your process when a garment is connected to someone you know personally? For you, is friendship more a source of inspiration, a space of resonance — or at times even a form of corrective?

It makes the process more personal. I think about real characters, their energy, their presence, and shared memories that are meaningful to me. Friendship is a strong source of inspiration for me because it strengthens each person in their own identity. That is essential.
At the same time, these relationships create a kind of resonance. They influence how I see my designs, how I develop them further, and sometimes how I question them. It is less about direct feedback and more about a shared understanding that shapes the process.

What does working in small editions allow you to preserve? And when does limitation start to feel like a conscious choice rather than a constraint?

It keeps me close to the product. I can work more consciously, make more precise decisions, and preserve the uniqueness of each piece. This creates something more personal and less interchangeable.

When working with small Italian ateliers, where does quality become non-negotiable for you — in the material, in the cut, in the finishing, or in something less tangible?

Everything.
Quality reveals itself in the details, in the materials, the cut, the craftsmanship, and above all in the fit. That is where I take the time it needs. For me, it also means paying close attention to the construction of a garment, how it is built, how cleanly it is made, and how well it holds its shape over time. That is where the difference really lies.

Croatian roots, Italian production — how present is that duality in your thinking? And where does it surface most clearly in the design itself?

For me, Croatia represents boldness, freedom, and a very vivid understanding of fashion, a way of expressing oneself and embracing life.
Italy, on the other hand, stands for precision, craftsmanship, and uncompromising quality. Both cultures carry a strong female energy, as an attitude, as a presence, as something natural. A woman as the centre, as a driving force, as someone who shapes rather than follows. This duality also becomes visible in the design itself, in the interplay between strong colours and clear silhouettes, between expression and controlled construction. That tension defines my work.

— Explore the Full Collection at www.maara-studio.com
all images seen by Karolina Golis, beauty by Anna Winkel for Maara Studio