“My favorite movie is Blow (2001) and it is the story of George Jung a famous drugs dealer. He started, how do you call it, ‘como se diche?’ He started with trafficking of marihuana and ended up with cocaine and he met Pablo Escobar and he was transporting drugs from Colombia to the US. You need to watch the movie it is so cool. Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz are in it. It is my favorite movie because I grew up in Napoli, Napoli is famous for the Camorra a mafia organization which isn’t inspirational to me, because when I was twenty I could have easily ended up with them inside their criminal organization.”
“It is very dangerous, you can end up in drugs trafficking or anything that is criminal and it is very easy money. If you grow up in that environment you think that what they do is a cool thing, but I managed to escape that. I studied and graduated in economics. And then I left Napoli and Italy when I was twenty-one. I went to London and even though I had a degree I started in retail as a sales associate at ZARA. I worked 20 hours a week and quickly grew to become the manager within a year. After three, four years at Zara I started working at Harrods as a manager in luxury retail.”
“During the seven years that I worked there I was managing 200 people, but I decided to create my own brand and line. It’s called Studios 28 and I develop my own products. My collection goes by different topics, like art, religion, freedom and hope. It is all about this message that I want to give to people. Nowadays it is all about communication and I think that I have a nice idea. That’s why Blow is one of my favorite movies, because you can see that he went to prison for many years. He just came out of jail like two years ago and he did not see his daughter and his wife for 40 years. So, you can understand how dangerous that life is if you end up in it.” – Leo
“He did not get the good ending like you did” – Feargal
“No, he had a bad ending.” – Leo
Photo taken by Feargal Agard
Story written by Feargal Agard