Forca Studio: the subversion of a futurist aesthetic

Forca Studio already occupies a singular place in São Paulo fashion. Created by Silvio De Marchi and Vivi Rivaben, the label was born of the fusion of distinct paths: she, with more than ten years of experience in the fashion market, moving between different creative roles; he, a music producer and DJ known in São Paulo nightlife, with an eye forged in the sonic and visual atmospheres of urban subcultures.

That joining produced an aesthetic project that announces itself, from the name onwards, as a manifesto. “Forca”, the gallows, is not a death sentence here, but a force of expression. It is the symbolic appropriation of a place of condemnation turned into creative fuel. In the label's manifesto, the unfitting and the non-normative do not appear as failures, but as affirmations. The desire is clear: to create disruptive clothes that work as devices of empowerment. Each piece is designed to turn the body into a surface of narrative. Fashion is language, but also an aesthetic weapon.

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The most immediate reading of its work recalls cyberpunk and steampunk, two aesthetics already established by science fiction and by alternative subcultures. But what Forca Studio does is a kind of Latin-urban translation of those languages.

In original cyberpunk, the setting is one of hyper-industrialised cities, lit by neon, controlled by megacorporations. In steampunk, it is Victorian retro-fiction, dominated by gears, steam and metallic ornament. At Forca Studio, those worlds hybridise, but filtered through the heat of São Paulo's streets, through the improvisation of the peripheries, through the colonial inheritance that still marks Latin daily life. The pieces reveal it in their forms: jackets that look like contemporary armour, but made for the urban body; layers that evoke gears, but in reclaimed fabrics; metallic details recalling demolition hardware, applied as ornament. The future imagined here is not that of Tokyo or London, but that of São Paulo and Mexico City, where precariousness and creative force mix in equal measure.

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That Latin-urban reading of cyberpunk and steam is not only aesthetic: it is political. It is to state that dystopias are not distant settings, but realities already lived in countries where inequality, violence and invention coexist daily. The pair's creative process is collaborative, but not linear. “Sometimes we create the same piece together; other times we work independently and then swap opinions”, Vivi explains. That dynamic results in a collection of pieces that feel personal and collective at once. The initial proposal was modest: a capsule of ten pieces to circulate among friends. But the immediate reception overran the plan. The wish for a closed circle became public demand, driven by direct dialogue with the urban community that recognises in Forca Studio an aesthetic of belonging.

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Each piece is designed as a device to circulate in multiple contexts. It can be worn on the street, at a party, on a stage or in an institutional space. That transition is fundamental: Forca Studio's fashion is not tied to a single code, but to Latin hybridity, made of crossings, improvisations and forms of resistance. If cyberpunk spoke of a dystopian future and steampunk of a reimagined past, Forca Studio speaks of a Latin present at boiling point. It is in that present, between concrete and precariousness, between rebellion and poetry, that the label finds its force.

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