We thought for the longest that French art/music/fashion collective Andrea Crews was maybe also a real-life person too. We imagined her sashaying around her studio amidst piles of vintage clothing, sifting through armfuls of '90s neon goodies with her minions to the tune of of raspy Gauloises-enhanced laughter.
The actual founder of the collective goes by the name Maroussia Rebecq and paid us a visit earlier this month all the way from France — almost as good as a date with our fictional lady.
In person Maroussia is even more awesome than we could have imagined — she wears reversible Versace-esque silk scarves as dresses — and just like in our dreams she laughs a whole lot. Above all she is very very Parisian in the best most uncompromising way. The crew were a couple of days away from a live art project in Paris with a group of local kids from their neighborhood in Northern Paris, the idea to transmit art/music happenings from one room via web-cam to gallery attendees in another.
There's literally so much going on in the collective it's kind of hard to keep track of it all: music video styling (AC from a Busy P video) to art/fashion workshops (like the one in Jersey we reported on a few months back) to a fair-trade project with Brazil and India that is being developed for the workshop. We've never been down to their space in Paris, but as Maroussia tells it the place is definitely a beehive of activity, with three huge rooms — workshop space, store front and showroom — rolled into one. Maybe we've just got a soft spot for the kids but it is really the projects with the youngest crew members that sit closest to our heart. One in particular that's in the works, an homage to fake luxury goods with kids in Beirut.