Thais M. Brandao
30, Stylist
Thais M. Brandao
30, Stylist
I am Thais Montessori Brandao, I’m 30 years old and I have mixed origins: Italian-Brazilian. My articulate last name is the proof. I am a stylist. The research of my origins, of my Afro descent, has become with time an essential aspect of my artistic research. I work and live in Milan, the city where I grew up, that I love so much and that allowed me to build a network of people and creatives I like to collaborate with. Being a woman is a wonderful gift, for me it is life itself.
Being a woman means living with the visceral impulses of creation and acceptance, it means perpetrating love, teaching to push away as much as possible the concept of destruction in the world, the ability to love beyond appearances.
When I speak of creation I am also referring to motherhood of course, but not only. It doesn't mean that women who don't go through the process of motherhood don't have these tools to read the world or that they are less women than others. What I mean is that any woman on the face of Earth is already an artist herself because she has the innate ability to create life.
Sisterhood is a process, something I am learning. To stop feeling in competition with others is everything that society doesn't tell you to do, so the alliance between women is a heroic act.
I grew up in the post economic boom Italy of Mediaset, with ZERO representation, and Bossi's Lega Nord stronger than ever. No one looked like me; at school, on television, everywhere I went. MTV was different, like everything coming from abroad. I grew up without role models, thinking therefore to be out of place. Over time I realized that if you don't find a role model, the world is probably telling you that that role model is you, and that you need to create it for yourself and for others like you. But it has been a difficult journey, timid and sometimes painful to reach this awareness. I can say today that I am proud of everything I am. And proud that I'm still working on the things I'd like to change for the better about myself, in no hurry. Hurry is the only female enemy I have.
