OC-exclusive womenswear label Bellavance is the team effort of designer duo and BFFs Nolan Bellavance and Ava Hama. The story goes: they met at a Parsons transfer orientation, Nolan saw Ava’s shoes and went to sit next to her, and so began a beautiful friendship (and clothing line!). Nolan and Ava invited us over to Ava’s Greenwich Village apartment-cum-studio for a tour and a chat about their influences, their new collection, and what’s in store for the future of Bellavance.
Dana Melanz: Nolan, you were raised in rural Canada. How did you end up in fashion design?
Nolan Bellavance: I love talking about this because our backgrounds are so different and that really makes our work special. It’s very secluded where I come from. It’s farmland and I didn’t have cable TV until I was 16. I think because of that, I used my imagination a lot, and I taught myself how to draw at an early age. When the opportunity came to go in fashion, it seemed like the right thing and I just did it. I went into journalism school first, and then I dropped out of that to go into fashion. I came to New York after I went to a menswear school in Montreal. I also think comic books played a huge part, which is funny—
Ava Hama: We only realized this later!
Ava, your dad is involved with GI Joe comics, right?
AH: Yeah, he’s a comic book writer and editor at Marvel. We’d been talking about our beginnings and Nolan brought up how he taught himself how to draw women by looking at comics.
NB: I was obsessed with their outfits.
AH: So we had a weird comic connection because I grew up in that culture. All of my dad’s friends are comic book artists. My parents’ apartment is full of illustrations.
Did you inherit artistic flair from your dad?
AH: My grandmother on my dad’s side was a seamstress. They lived in Queens, and she would copy designer clothes and make dresses for women. I always had a tendency towards sewing. My mom’s a knitter so she taught me how to knit at an early age, and the whole drawing thing is from my dad.
Does that comic book aspect comes out in your designs?
NB: I don’t really see that it really influences what we do. But that’s where my obsession with women came from, and how they dressed and this idea of power in women that I guess I’d never seen before, and that’s really something that’s stuck with us. It’s fun to sketch and draw your women as super powerful and really dynamic.
You want your designs to make women feel beautiful and very empowered. Is it the idea of an inner superhero?
NB: The clothes can be their superpower.
For this collection, what would you say that your biggest influences were?
AH: Our tagline for this season was foundations, both familial and structural. A big theme was duality and the things we designed were referring to styles as being sisters. We designed Spring in groups of three, moving into this triangular foundation.
NB: We wanted to design the collection in a way that we could play with the dynamic notion of how relationships work within a trio so there are different groups within the collection that we purposely designed into and how those types of things all play together. As we’re evolving we’d like to create something that isn’t too referential so we’ll pull different inspirations from many different areas, so things end up blending in together. Like specifically we kept seeing scaffolding and were really inspired by the paneling and the texture. Historically we’re referencing Claire McCardell and the foundation of sportswear so there are some stripes and wrapping
Dana Melanz: Nolan, you were raised in rural Canada. How did you end up in fashion design?
Nolan Bellavance: I love talking about this because our backgrounds are so different and that really makes our work special. It’s very secluded where I come from. It’s farmland and I didn’t have cable TV until I was 16. I think because of that, I used my imagination a lot, and I taught myself how to draw at an early age. When the opportunity came to go in fashion, it seemed like the right thing and I just did it. I went into journalism school first, and then I dropped out of that to go into fashion. I came to New York after I went to a menswear school in Montreal. I also think comic books played a huge part, which is funny—
Ava Hama: We only realized this later!
Ava, your dad is involved with GI Joe comics, right?
AH: Yeah, he’s a comic book writer and editor at Marvel. We’d been talking about our beginnings and Nolan brought up how he taught himself how to draw women by looking at comics.
NB: I was obsessed with their outfits.
AH: So we had a weird comic connection because I grew up in that culture. All of my dad’s friends are comic book artists. My parents’ apartment is full of illustrations.
Did you inherit artistic flair from your dad?
AH: My grandmother on my dad’s side was a seamstress. They lived in Queens, and she would copy designer clothes and make dresses for women. I always had a tendency towards sewing. My mom’s a knitter so she taught me how to knit at an early age, and the whole drawing thing is from my dad.
Does that comic book aspect comes out in your designs?
NB: I don’t really see that it really influences what we do. But that’s where my obsession with women came from, and how they dressed and this idea of power in women that I guess I’d never seen before, and that’s really something that’s stuck with us. It’s fun to sketch and draw your women as super powerful and really dynamic.
You want your designs to make women feel beautiful and very empowered. Is it the idea of an inner superhero?
NB: The clothes can be their superpower.
For this collection, what would you say that your biggest influences were?
AH: Our tagline for this season was foundations, both familial and structural. A big theme was duality and the things we designed were referring to styles as being sisters. We designed Spring in groups of three, moving into this triangular foundation.
NB: We wanted to design the collection in a way that we could play with the dynamic notion of how relationships work within a trio so there are different groups within the collection that we purposely designed into and how those types of things all play together. As we’re evolving we’d like to create something that isn’t too referential so we’ll pull different inspirations from many different areas, so things end up blending in together. Like specifically we kept seeing scaffolding and were really inspired by the paneling and the texture. Historically we’re referencing Claire McCardell and the foundation of sportswear so there are some stripes and wrapping