POSTCARDS FROM POSITANO

Some collections begin with a sketch. Others begin with a place. This one began with a distance.

Positano is the kind of place you do not visit; you receive it. It arrives slowly, like a postcard written by someone who went away for a few days and never quite came back the same person. That is how this collection came to me. Not as a destination to reach, but as a longing for a summer that may never have existed, and that for exactly that reason belongs to all of us.

I thought of you as I put these pieces together. Not you dressed to be seen, but you in the moment when, at last, no one is watching. Walking down the three hundred steps to a beach only the locals know. Lingering over lunch in the shade of a vine, in no hurry at all to finish. Letting the salt dry on your skin because the water is still warm and the afternoon is still entirely yours.

The colours came before the names. The pink of the Amalfi façades at the close of day. The olive green of the lemon terraces that fall towards the sea. The impossible blue of the Grotta Azzurra, that blue that seems to rise from beneath the water. The black of the volcanic stone under the old streets of Salerno. I did not choose these colours at a desk. I found them already there, in the way the coast wears them, without announcement, without effort.

The names came last, once I understood the state of mind. I called the bikini that is the village itself Positano. Ravello, the swimsuit that holds the colour of morning over the Golfo di Salerno, where a woman named Jackie spent the summer of 1962 escaping the world. Fontelina, the shell necklace, after the Capri beach club you can only reach by boat. Botticelli, the golden-shell necklace, after the goddess born of the sea. Each piece is a postcard. Each name, the postmark of the place it was sent from.

"Postcards from Positano is not an invitation to go anywhere. It is the reminder that the summer you are looking for already lives inside you." Sofia Godinho

John Steinbeck wrote, in 1953, that Positano bites deep. That it is a dream place that does not quite seem real while you are there, and that becomes intensely real once you have left. That is the feeling I wanted these pieces to keep. The texture of a linen towel in the sun. The right weight of a necklace against the collarbone after a swim. The way a black swimsuit needs no colour at all to say everything.

I am not selling you a journey. I am offering you the chance to carry it with you. In the right piece. In the decision to wear it. In the moment, however brief, when everything else can wait.

Write back.

With love, Sofia