Artful Vision | Mïro LaFlaga

"All I'm gonna do is just go on and do what I feel." - Jimi Hendrix

Picture a young boy, a fan of cartoons and animation, with a first love for fashion. Now picture him years later, in college, waltzing between degrees - electrical engineering, psychology, sociology. Again, picture him a few years later, chasing the American Dream, working a high position at Rogers' management office. He's making good money; everything seems right. "What do you see? We live our lives based on perceptions. These perceptions help form our reality and influence how we interact with it." It may come as a surprise but none of what he had was sitting well with Mïro LaFlaga. "I feel like most my life, my early twenties, I was just sort of floating through shit [...], I wasn't comfortable with myself. It seemed like [this path] was right, but inside, I knew it wasn't right for myself."

Creating outfits was never something Mïro LaFlaga had a hard time with. It was the combining of his love for cartoons, animation and clothes along with making a living out of it, that for the longest time remained a mystery to him. Last summer, however, LaFlaga flipped everything around. Back to back work suspensions spurred him to quit his job on a whim, only to also quit school shortly after. The plan was to remix people into his own vision; he had clothes, knew loads of people who had clothes he could rent, and knew he could reach out to heaps of photographers and videographers. Slowly -- and subsequent to the first two times he organized, conceptualized and managed a shoot -- the Mïro LaFlaga experience was born and value was added to his work as he started charging for his services.

Today, resurfacing from a recent depression and experimentation with spiritual healing trips, LaFlaga is more present than ever: "My job as an artist is to open up conversations, [...] put them in the universe and whatever happens, happens, regardless of how extreme it may be." When he speaks about his creative process, akin to a Rubik's cube mathematician, he describes it as if he's in another dimension mixing what he knows with what he feels. "My mother is not a Rastafarian," he explains, "but it's a beautiful teaching in terms of how you treat your body, how you view the world. I take a lot of elements from that and try to apply them to my craft." But deploring the lack of purpose and the watered down campaigns of today’s fashion industry, LaFlaga draws attention back to attitude, to his carefree 1970s influences, such as Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. "The clothes don't make you. You make the clothes. It's the attitude that needs to be portrayed through the clothes. It's way beyond garments. It's a state of mind."

Mïro LaFlaga, Montreal-based visual architect and stylist, for this week's Artful Vision.

Instagram: @mirolaflaga