Hello and Happy New Year, everyone! It’s been a while since our latest blog article as we’ve been busy updating Ecce Homo’s e-shop in order to keep providing our friends and customers with the best shopping experience ever! New graphics, new products, upgraded associated products sections are but a few of the most recent improvements we’ve been working on over the past few weeks that kept us from writing another fashion blog article. But here we are, with a brand-new piece of writing, Ecce Homo’s way to say our goodbyes to 2023 by recapping a fabulous year full of inspiration, fashion designs, colors, photo shootings, blogging, and community partnerships! Without a further ado, let’s dive into it, shall we?

Regarding our extensive Corporate Social Responsibility program, we have been by the side of our community allies from all over the world, all those non-profit LGBTIQ+ organizations that run invaluable programs, offer indispensable services, and create vital communal spaces around them. More specifically, we keep honoring our long-term engagement to promote the visibility of our community allies’ initiatives by taking up the role of media sponsor. It represents a great opportunity to keep informed our customers of the activities of the organizations they support via their purchase, ensuring this way both their active engagement and the non-negotiable transparency of our CSR program. Just take a look at Ecce Homo’s X/Twitter, our brand’s social media exclusively dedicated to promoting our CSR program, an account full of daily posts and reposts that allows our friends and customers to follow our work closely and actively engage with it. We really value your feedback guys, so feel free to share or/and comment! At this point we would like to remind you once again that 5% of the price of each purchase (before VAT) is to be donated by Ecce Homo to an LGBTIQ+ organization of customer’s choosing!

What 2023 saw regarding our CSR was the introduction of a new community partnership to the list of our community allies we had been collaborating with so far, InterACT - Advocates for Intersex Youth, the first organization we are joining forces with from the USA and the first one advocating for intersex rights in our attempt to cover as many issues -that queer community in its diversity faces- as possible since we are committed to a truly intersectional approach. A short presentation of this amazing organization is due! InterACT – Advocates for Intersex Youth (formerly known as Advocates for Informed Choice) was founded in 2006 by attorney Anne Tamar-Mattis in Boston, Massachusetts. They use innovative legal and other strategies to advocate for the human rights of children, teens, and twenty-somethings born with intersex traits or variations of sex development. According to their Compassion Statement, the law, properly use, is a tool for achieving justice; and justice, properly understood, has compassion at its heart. They firmly believe that with so much at stake for the individuals and families involved, they must consider not only medical outcomes but also the civil and human rights of children born with intersex traits.

When it comes to our fashion blogging, 2023 was a really prolific year with articles covering an extensive range of topics, from opinion pieces and news coverage all the way to fashion blogging. Among the social and political issues we offered a commentary upon was postcoloniality and femonationalism, the body positivity movement, the issue of algorithmic bias, and the neoliberal turn of homonormative politics. In addition, this was a year full of historical throwbacks, a way to revisit and explore the past of the LGBTIQA+ community and retrieve invaluable lessons with articles regarding homosexuality and the Holocaust and the history of the so-called New Queer Cinema. However, our focus was locked on fashion history with three blog series that covered the pink and blue history of color, its use and its symbolic, gender-coded, meaning for the fashion industry, and the twin histories of underwear and swimwear from the ancient times to the 2000s. It wouldn’t have been much of a blogging without Ecce Homo’s guides, like the ones on ‘how to avoid sexist language’,  ‘how to get a beach body and stay safe during summer’, and the practical color-blocking guide. Finally, we have inaugurated a brand-new section on our blog full of exclusive interviews with people working in fashion industry, like fashion designers, models, make-up artists, photographers, stylists, creative directors, etc. One can read the first two of these interviews with Ecce Homo’s fashion designer, Chara Georgakis, and with the plus-size model and fashion entrepreneur Nasiana Polyzou. There are many more interviews to come in 2024! I promise!

Finally, 2023 was also a very creative year for Ecce Homo fashion-wise! Apart from ceaselessly updating and enriching our six underwear collections with new designs and colors, we introduced our first-ever swimwear collection titled RetroWaves making this way our first steps into queer swimwear market! RetroWaves is inspired by the 80s vibes, comes in red and blue geometrical patterns and is made of supreme quality elastane/spandex fabric known for its durability, flexibility and low-maintenance. Regarding the last part, an Ecce Homo guide on how to take care of your swimwear is readily available! RetroWaves is a collection set to playfully explore the connections between the two basic colors, the (signal) blue and the (carmine) red in order to unsettle the gender binary and gender associations of these two colors. Another reference point that permeates the designing philosophy behind this collection comes from the 80s as a hallmark of empowerment, dynamism, and liberation. In other words, the athletic style was a way of talking about body positivity and the fact that every-body can be athletic. Furthermore, 2023 saw another venture of our queer little brand, the launching of a brand-new color for many of our products across our existing collections that was and continues to be a great hit, the pink, due to the Barbie effect! This an ad hoc monochromatic collection brought together by top-quality cotton underwear in this fresh and vibrant eye-catching pink aims at debunking the ‘blue for boys/ pink for girls’ fashion and gender rule that seems to dominate both fashion and our cultural imaginary. 

So here comes 2024 with more designs, photo-shootings, sales, and community involvement! Happy and Queer New Year everyone!