October, 2023:

The TRUE STORIES [E050] lookbook concept envelopes the EBiT™ debut physical SS24 collection launch in short-story art form by narrating the parallel 2,000-word personal journeys of two individuals whose lives have been deeply touched by the spectrum of mental health experiences and whom intersect via EBiT™ today.

Amina Ladymya shares her story of moving from Senegal, where she was grew up living in hospital grounds surrounded by mental health patients, via France to become a rising talent in the fashion hub of Milan. 

Daniel Moors recounts a tumultuous upbringing and rebellious youth in Manchester’s subcultural underground at the Hacienda nightclub – and how he came, after surviving a breakdown and suicidal ideations in Shanghai, to settle as an English teacher in Italy. Daniel is the cousin of EBiT™ founder Simon Whitehouse.

 

Amina excerpt: 

“I grew up in a psychiatric hospital. My father had to live inside and be available 24/7 for emergencies. When someone broke down in the night, he was there. So were we. Many extreme moments, on alert. Deep, crazy situations. Waking up to screams and broken glass at any time. Chaos. We experienced all of that vulnerability and confusion that comes with a psychotic break. The horror when you look into the eyes of a lost soul. Harrowing.”

Daniel excerpt:

“We were partying a lot at the Hacienda in Manchester (FAC51). On Fridays, DJs Graham Park and Mike Pickering used to play tunes like “Me, Myself and I” by De La Soul and “Keep on Moving” by Soul II Soul. Cliché songs, but just sounded amazing. We had the ‘Stoke’ corner. 30 odd people in the bottom corner of the Hacienda all from Stoke-on-Trent. Mad times. Madchester”

 These true, raw and intimate stories display vulnerability as a strength and are housed in EBiT™’s unique SS24 look-book TRUE STORIES [E050] concept. [E050] is available digitally and in physical form as a flip-out concertina concept, the printed object’s folded layers reflecting the complexities of individual mental health experiences – and our capacity to come together in solidarity and support around them.

“I feel a lot of people in fashion will relate to the TRUE STORIES of Amina and Daniel. I urge people to read them – so empowering. Fashion can be an incredible medium to build community and belonging. Clothes can cocoon our vulnerabilities, creating a silent solidarity. I am so touched and proud of Amina and Daniel for sharing their stories in this unique concept” 

– Simon Whitehouse, EBiT™ Founder

TRUE STORIES [E050] lookbook images were created by Mauro Maglione, an upcoming Italian photographer with projects with Miu Miu, Valentino and Ferragamo to his name. Styling by rising Italian artist Francesca Cisani. Writing and editing by fashion journalist Ashley Simpson and EBiT™.

 

The debut SS24 EBiT™ range - gender-neutral, luxury casual wear in cocoon shaped over-sized silhouettes - is 100% made in Italy, from organic fabrics. The SS24 collection available exclusively in Modes boutiques in Paris and Milan from January 2024. Retail prices range €175-€500.

 

Amina:

 

OK, let’s start at the beginning. I grew up in Senegal, born and raised in the capital. My parents are originally from Kaolack, a port on the Saloum River about an hour away from Dakar, towards to The Gambia.

 

I had a normal life for many years. It was amazing. Warm. Full of family and love. I was a dreamer. Also, a doer. As a teenager I had a little shop and I was studying styling. I went to school from 9am to 4pm, then I worked in the store, designing clothes. The outfits were far out, wild – not wearable at all! Crazy and creative pieces for journalists and singers. I knew that I was destined for another place from 6 or 7 years old. I had a vision for it. I felt it.

 

Despite my dreams and ambitions, the opportunities were limited in Dakar. The culture is challenging. There isn’t space to open up. You can’t show your creativity. You can’t show your emotions. Even if you do, no one cares. Often, I felt like I lived in a separate dimension.

 

To understand me deeply, you should know that I grew up in a psychiatric hospital. My dad was the director. He had to live inside and be available 24/7 in case of emergencies. Therefore, my family lived on the property with him. When someone broke down in the night, he was there. Naturally, so were we. There were many extreme moments. We were on alert. Deep and crazy situations. Waking up to screams and broken glass at any time. Chaos. We experienced all of the vulnerability and confusion that comes with a psychotic break. The horror when you look into the eyes of a lost soul. Harrowing.

 

These instances tended to happen in the beginning when someone arrived. With time, care, medication, people calmed. Little by little. This was always normal for us. I didn’t know anything else. It was simply a part of my journey. A kind of surreal extended family in a way.

 

Growing up like this isn’t as dramatic as you might think. Upon arrival, the patients were always kept inside. But as they started to recover, they walked outside in the fresh air. This was when we found each other. It was incredible to see them coming back to themselves. Pure joy. I knew all the patients and when I passed, they would call to me, ‘Hey my love!’ Maybe it's a guy and he would say I’m his girlfriend. We smiled and we laughed together.

 

When you grow up like I did, surrounded by people working through these intimate and raw interior experiences, it shapes you. You begin to sense who someone is from their first words. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s innate. There are a lot of people who think they are okay who are not. Later, I experienced this personally.

 

I was in a long-term relationship with my boyfriend. Things were good for a while. Happy. But my life changed in an instant once we lived together. To say he had a second self is an understatement. This is why I say some individuals think they’re fine when they’re not. He had created a separate persona, and this is who he showed to the world. And, unfortunately, to me too.

 

Once we lived together his true self came out, and it was violently unpleasant. I will spare the details. 

 

My approach was to try and get him help. Why not see a therapist? He refused. He insisted he was okay. It’s difficult to help someone when they don't believe they have a problem. And since the worst has already happened, you stay trying to help. I was made to stop working. If he had all the resources, I had to bend to him. I felt totally trapped. I was so young, only 20 years old at the time. It was my first time by myself, my first-time confronting life.

 

Eventually, for my safety, I moved back home with my parents. This didn’t stop him. He would call and scream threatening horrific things to me. I would wake up to 82 new emails, all sent in the same night, each one contradicting the last. “Please, I’m sorry.” “If I see you, I will kill you.” “I miss you.” It was awful.

 

Nothing in my life has impacted me as traumatically as this. It was like a storm that took out all the lights. I moved in the darkness. I feel grateful that I am still myself. Everything happened so quickly. I had no time to sit and take in what was happening to me. I just kept on going without the time to realize, doing my best to not drown or disintegrate.

 

In the end, after years of running, wanting a life beyond what I found at home, I left Senegal.

 

Somehow, I arrived in Paris. I had only €50 in my pocket, a luggage full of dreams and nothing much else. I stayed with relatives at the start. On my very first day, a woman approached me asking if I was a model. She told me: “If you’re not a model, you’re throwing a lot of money away!” She gave me her card and told me to come to her office. I would have gone in that instant — it was all I wanted — but I waited until the next morning. At 9am, I was there. They took my Polaroids, and I signed the contract without even reading it. I had little to lose. If it didn’t work out, I would go home. 

 

Immediately, two months of time-out became two months of work. I started going to castings. It all seemed like a dream, from another dimension. It was something totally unplanned and unexpected. I wasn’t prepared, but I dived in anyway. You can stop to think, to feel anxiously each moment, or you can just let go. I’m the person who jumps.

 

During this period, I traveled a lot. I did this alone. It was a type of therapy, going everywhere by myself. When I lived with that person, he made me think I couldn’t do anything without him, that I was nothing. So, I told myself I would confront every situation alone. I traveled, I learned a new language, entered new spaces. Every problem I solved on my own. It was a challenge that helped me a lot. I can do it alone, independently. I learned that there are people by your side, people ready to help you, and they can be everything. But when they are not, you are enough.

 

From Paris, I went back to Senegal and an agency in Milan immediately called me back. I came to Italy with all of my documents, and I organized a work permit by myself. Step by step, I started to build something.  With the help of people who trusted me, I began to nurture a life in Milan. I already spoke French, so the language was not too difficult for me. I stayed because I felt at home. Within two years, I spoke Italian fluently and was working regularly.

 

Today in Milan I feel like I’m in a different place than many of the other working models. Many just work, go on vacation, buy the perfect bag. It can be very materialistic. It is not quite the same for me. I have sisters back home and people to care about. The sentiments in my heart and mind keep me strongly connected to my roots in Senegal. However, I’m not sure if I will live there again. It’s a place where people live in a box. Everything is so closed. They don’t see that women are 100 years ahead elsewhere. I think we’ve already lost the older generation. We can’t change their minds. We can’t change the culture or how they think. But we can try to do something for young people.

 

I dream to build something in Senegal. I would love to build a community with a school, a workshop. Kind of a big showroom of outfits that are also produced there by hand with the workshop handing down the skills and craft to the dreamers of the next generation. Maybe I can’t change a lot, but I can try to do something, touch some people. It is better than doing nothing. Africa doesn’t need the clothes that people send from Europe. We need to create our own. This is just one dream. There are many things I would like to do if I am able. Let’s see how it goes. My mind is a machine. A factory of dreams.

 

I enjoy being.

 

Daniel:

 

My early years were tough, I won’t lie. Lots of moving around, changing houses, different schools, etc. I grew up in Stoke-on-Trent, in the north of England. It’s an old coal mining and pottery industry city that was left desolated by Thatcher’s regime to capitalize the UK into a white-collar state.

 

My mum had me when she was very young – just 16 years old. That’s not ideal, let’s face it, and back in the 1960s even worse. Soon after, my mum met my stepdad and that wasn’t great for me. I won’t get into it too much. It’s kind of a deep trauma line that stays with me.

 

Skip forward a few years. School. I hated it. I didn’t want to be there. And there were very few teachers I liked. At 15, I decided not to go to school again. Fuck that system, give me the Sex Pistols! At 16, I started selling whatever I could - washing machines, fridge freezers, all sorts. I left home around 17. I became a father at 20 to my son Zack. We weren’t ready to be parents. We were still children ourselves. Later, I worked in a fashion store, which was probably one of my favorite jobs. Guess I was always a kind of salesman.

 

It was bleak. Doom and gloom. Depressing. There was a recession, the troubles with the IRA, the miners strikes, etc. Interest rates were at 14% and we had to take a 40-year mortgage out, my son’s mum and me, just to afford a home. The anarchy of punk music was born from this societal cocktail.

 

Weekends were escapism. Joy. It was a crazy time, with such division and aggression in society. But we didn’t see too much of it because we were off the beaten path, having such a good time. We were young, naïve, and finding ourselves. On the average week, we were out Wednesday through Saturday, then up to Blackburn on a Sunday morning. We’d finish Sunday afternoon with a strawberry milkshake and a pie from the motorway services. We’d had nothing to eat all weekend except love!

 

You have to understand how insular Stoke was at the time. It was a very ‘white’ place. We didn’t go outside of our neighborhoods. No ethnic mix or multiculturism. No social media. Our culture became the music and the people in the rave scene. Driving to Nottingham or London over the weekend became our norm. Thousands of people in an abandoned warehouse all thru the night, and later, in clubs like Shelleys, Hacienda and Entropy. Gay, straight, black, white, trans, girl, boy, drag. None of it mattered. We were just bound together as one, everyone letting go. Our world opened up. Experiencing all that as a teenager was sometimes overwhelming but exhilarating. Seeing just a normal area in Brixton with lots of black and brown people when we went to The Fridge, for example, felt dangerous but it also felt safe as we were all united by the music, by the culture, by the E. Life lasting friendships were made.

 

It was all about the music, amazing music. And the DJ.

 

We were partying a lot at the Hacienda in Manchester (FAC51 in Factory Records cataloging system). On Fridays, DJs Graham Park and Mike Pickering used to play tunes like “Say No Go” by De La Soul and “Keep on Moving” by Soul II Soul at the end of the night. Kind of cliché songs, but they just sounded amazing. We had the ‘Stoke Corner’. It was probably 30 people in the bottom corner of the Hacienda all from Stoke-on-Trent. It was mad times, and mad music. Literally, Madchester.

 

Back then the beauty was that there was a lot of different stuff going on and it was all thrown together and it was all just cool. Detroit. Acid. Early hip-hop. Then, Andy Weatherall came along and he started to change it up - a lot. He was an amazing DJ and a good man (RIP). He gave the Hacienda this extreme new sound. The sound started getting weird, a bit more acid-y, edgier. As the music changed, the fashion evolved too. It moved from this quite hedonistic outerwear to smart ravers wearing Paul Smith, CP [Company] and Timberland. A culture was being born.

 

The scene would have probably continued for me had the joy not taken a turn for the worse. A couple of years later, I got caught up in some stuff I shouldn’t have. Enough said about that. However, the values of that whole movement were ingrained into me forever. The openness to all walks of life. Ensuring everyone’s wellbeing, that everyone is OK and safe, and having a good time. And the music - always, the music.

 

Deeper into adulthood, the fragility of life hit us hard. My stepfather and my wife’s stepfather passed away within six months of each other. Cancer. So, in our forties, we upped and left Stoke-on-Trent to travel the world for a year. We spent three months in India, moved through Nepal, China, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos Malaysia, Bali, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Argentina, and ended in Bolivia.

 

When we were in China, we were doing a trek in Lijiang called Tiger Leaping Gorge. It’s a tough track, and it was pissing down with rain. We were lost. Seriously, and metaphorically. When we found our way, we met a couple from the UK living in Shanghai and they were teaching. They explained the terms, and we thought we could do that. So, we moved to Shanghai, China - just like that! We had no jobs or housing organized – we just took the plunge. Within two weeks we were both fixed up with jobs teaching English to children in China.

 

I love teaching children. I never imagined I would be a children’s teacher, let alone in China. But life is about breaking your generational traumas, flipping them from negative into positive. Full circle. The truth is I’m not actually a teacher. I’m really more of a salesman. But a teacher and a salesman are kind of the same. Hear me out. If you’re a salesman, it's about a persona, right? If you like me, trust me, you’ll buy from me. Teaching is the same. It’s about personality and energy. And if they like the teacher, the children will engage, and they’ll learn. Teaching has become a solid anchor of my life, and I am proud of my achievements in it.

 

I never really suffered any mental health issues until I was around 45. Something within me just switched. It made no sense. I was in a great city, Shanghai. I was financially okay. My family was great. Then this thing just turned in my brain. I didn’t know what it was or how to deal with it. You go down this path of not feeling very nice about yourself, calling yourself these names you wouldn’t call anyone else. But it makes no sense why you feel like that. The coping mechanism tool I was using was alcohol. It’s deceptively good for dealing with (escaping) the situation. Until the next day, when you feel worse.

 

There is no guide to that evil bastard invader called depression. It creeps up on you. Untreated, depression can become suicide. I knew big men, fearsome characters, from back home in Stoke-on-Trent who have committed suicide. Gone. Men who you would never think would do that. Naughty lads, with massive character and aura, then suddenly committed suicide and you never understood - why? But now my thoughts were taking me to that edge. One night, I drank three bottles of whisky then I stood on the balcony in Shanghai. I was going to jump. When I was ready to go, I saw my son’s face like a flash. I came down. After this incident I realized I needed to go and see someone. That killed my soul.

 

Mental health in China is not acknowledged. There’s a massive shortage of psychiatrists. Culturally, it’s seen as a form of weakness. I was given some pills to treat the depression. But I couldn’t function. You’ve gotta imagine I was a teacher, active and animated in the class, very full on. Then, when I took this drug, it shut me down. I found hypnosis. I was cynical but it unlocked so many horrible boxes of my life. It helped me to open and close them. It’s like when you go into hypnosis you’ve got blocks under your ribs and when you come out you can breathe fully again. This all happened a couple of years before the pandemic, which blocked all of us around the world, especially in China.

 

After a series of brutal and isolating lockdowns, my wife and I got on a plane from Shanghai to Frankfurt to Madrid. Inside Spain, we got the train down to Alicante, with six suitcases cases and two dogs in boxes. Then we hopped over to Cantu in Italy, for a new opportunity and chapter of life, this time teaching English to Italian children! Today we feel in this state of flux, in transition, waiting for our visas, nervous to begin life in earnest again, anxious with this instability. Yet, somehow, we trust the process. We feel the sense of possibilities.

 

How am I now? Through sport and music, I am coping, and I am living life.

 

I enjoy being.