Cherry PaoPao didn't come from a mood board. It came from Brussels, specifically from a version of Brussels made of small, repeatable Saturdays, the kind that don't look like much written down and somehow add up to an entire brand.

It usually starts at the Sablon market, early enough that the stallholders are still setting up and the square hasn't filled with tourists yet. I'm not looking for anything in particular, just walking slowly past tables of old buttons, mismatched cutlery, the occasional genuinely beautiful bead someone's selling for almost nothing because they don't know what it is. There's a particular kind of attention that only happens early on a Saturday, before the day has decided what it's going to be. Half of what ends up in our pieces started as something spotted at that market on a morning with no plan behind it, a colour combination on a stranger's stall table, a clasp shape on a piece of costume jewellery from decades before any of us were born.

After the market, there's usually a stop at a matcha bar nearby, the kind of place with three seats and a queue that moves slowly enough you end up talking to whoever's next to you. Brussels does this well, small spaces that feel generous rather than cramped. I've had more good conversations standing at a counter waiting for a drink than in most meetings I've sat through. There's a woman who works there who once told me, unprompted, about the necklace her grandmother wore every day for forty years, and I've thought about that conversation more times than I can count since. Some of the best material for this brand has come from people who had no idea they were giving it to me.

Then the side streets. The ones between Sablon and the Marolles that don't show up on the obvious walking routes, where the shopfronts change every few months and the good finds are the ones nobody's put in a guidebook yet. This is where the city stops being background and starts being material. A door colour becomes a stone choice. A shopfront becomes a clasp shape. An awning I've walked past a hundred times becomes, on the hundred and first, exactly the shade of green I'd been trying to describe to a supplier for weeks.

There's also the version of Brussels that's less picturesque and just as important, the grey mornings, the trams running late, the particular tiredness of carrying bags of materials back from a market that didn't have parking anywhere near it. I don't want to pretend this city only shows up as postcards. It shows up as ordinary difficulty too, and honestly that's part of what makes it feel like home rather than a backdrop. A place you only love for its pretty parts isn't a place you actually live in.

None of this is deliberate research. It's just what a weekend here looks like, market, coffee, walking, getting slightly lost, going home with more bags than intended and no memory of buying half of what's in them. It turns out that's enough to shape a whole brand, one ordinary Saturday at a time, without ever once sitting down and trying to define what Cherry PaoPao is supposed to mean.

Cherry PaoPao is, in a very literal sense, Brussels turned into something you can wear. Not the postcard version. The lived-in one.

— Paola