Yesterday, the beloved freaky fashion Instagram account @Vanillajellaba made (another) triumphant return. The account which consists largely of photos of its anonymous owner (or owners) turning the layering clothes into an art form. Vanillajellaba’s identity has long been a source of fascination for the account’s 18,000 followers, and the account routinely deletes all of its posts. This week brought another wipe-and-return. But this latest iteration might provide a clue about who is behind the account, at least at the current moment.
When Vanillajellaba returned yesterday, it did so with a new detail: the profile name “Maria Calvia.” I decided I had to at least try to find out more about this years-long mystery.
A quick Google search of the name didn’t provide a lot to go on. But I remembered that wunderkind designer Kiko Kostadinov has long been affiliated with Vanillajellaba. One of the account’s restarts, in the spring of 2017, was “a ‘takeover’ of Kostadinov’s Fall 2018 collection,” according to Vogue. Kostadinov and Vanillajellaba also collaborated on an event at the Serpentine Pavilion in London.
So I entered “Maria Calvia Kiko Kostadinov” into Google—which, perhaps unsurprisingly but definitely shockingly, seemed to bear fruit. I found a LinkedIn profile of someone named Paride Calvia, who lists Kiko Kostadinov as their place of employment. Hey now! It didn’t require too much more effort to search for “Paride Maria Calvia,” which yielded another helpful result. I’d never been so excited to navigate to a Blogspot page as I was clicking on the one for Subsubtropics Records, a now-dormant music label founded in the summer of 2010. The website lists the label’s founders as Vinicius Duarte and…Paride Maria Calvia. So: who is Paride Maria Calvia? And what do they have to do with Vanillajellaba?
Here’s what I could find: Calvia appears to be a longtime collaborator and/or employee of Kiko Kostadinov. Calvia has created playlists and audio loops for Kostadinov’s runway shows, and has also worked alongside him as a photographer. Calvia also appears—fittingly, in the shadows—in a group photo of folks who work at Kiko Kostadinov. So things were really adding up here: I’d established that a Paride Maria Calvia works at Kiko Kostadinov, which the Vanillajellaba account has long been associated with.
Still, this was no definitive proof. A direct message I sent to Vanillajellaba was left on read, and the PR agency that represents Kostadinov sent back the below GIF when I asked if the designer might be willing to comment on the person behind the account and the possibility it was Paride Calvia.
The representative added, “Kiko won't be able to comment on that as he won't even tell us!”
There was still more tea-leaf reading to do, though. While Calvia works closely with Kostadinov, they also take on outside projects. An editorial shot by Calvia seems to feature a bit of Vanillajellaba’s trademark layering and anything-can-be-a-wrap instincts. In the photo, a series of chunky wool sweaters stitched together drapes off the model’s hip. Another shoot Calvia worked on with model Dylan Moran features freaky jeans reminiscent of the big pants Vanillajellaba wore during its own denim phase. The last bit of my Sherlock Holmes monologue: a Youtube account associated with Calvia has exactly one video posted to it. The short film’s distorted and disorienting (and frankly disturbing) sensibility shares a spirit with the weirdo videos Vanillajellaba used to post.
Still, there are reasons to believe that even if Calvia is the person behind this latest version of Vanillajellaba, they haven’t always been the handle’s proprietor. The description of the event between Kostadinov and Vanillajellaba said that the Instagram account was run by an “anonymous collective.” At one point, there were definitely two different people posting to the account—“One with a dainty, modelesque posture, the other slightly more hunched, aggressive,” Steff Yotka wrote for Vogue in 2018.
Knowing who is behind Vanillajellaba isn’t essential to enjoying the account. Part of the joy that comes in following the account is how bizarre and surreal it is—that these outfits could be beamed from some other version of reality. Still, it’s always nice to put a name to a wrapped-up, obscured, balaclava-wearing face.
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