The Brand

To be different, stylish and extravagant is in the blood of the fashion designer Mariyana Panayotova. Heritage, transferred for generations, runs through her veins – the women in her family have always had impeccable sense of elegance and exquisiteness, which turns every piece of fabric into unique clothing. The El Mari dresses are magical interweaving of talent and imagination, fusion of skills, expressive materials, unconventional approach, feminine details and grace. In result beauty is born.

Mariyana is, as far as we know, the only fashion designer in Bulgaria to use the Moulinage technique, where she basically sculptures the dress over the body of a live model, using the behavior (flow, flexibility, texture, etc.) of the fabric as inspiration. She was in her twenties when she started winning various fashion awards and soon, realizing her own potential, she contacted us to build the El Mari brand.

The name she chose herself as she was already using it as an artistic pseudonym. We proposed few possible graphical representations, based on the insights we gathered in our study of her and the French feel we wanted the brand to bear. El Mari is young, talented, boiling with ideas and provocative. So is the logo.

El Mari Fashion Atelier’s logo


The Photosessions

Other than the fashion shows/competitions she participated in she actually didn’t have any professional photos of her work. And as needed to start designing various materials and of course a web site, we really needed to organize the first professional photo shoot for El Mari. It was ass. prof. PhD Atanas Kunchev, one of best Bulgarian advertising photographers, who took the challenge. Four amazing women, two of them young actresses – Uliana Chan-Manolova, Lydia Indjova, Janina Dragonova и Katina Alexandrova, agreed to be our models. The result was mesmerizing. You can see the entire collection on El Mari’s website, which we will talk about in a while.

Uliana Chan-Manolova in one of El Mari’s Dresses


El Mari’s Web Site