St. Joan

St. Joan makes the strange and beautiful, handmade, painstakingly detailed costumes and wigs for theatre, film, fashion, and, being based in New Orleans, Carnival. A costume shop is an easy brand to get wrong. The obvious move is playful and theatrical, all spotlights and jazz hands, which would have made serious craft look like a party-supply store. St. Joan is darker and more interesting than that, rooted in New Orleans and drawn to the macabre, and the brand had to match the maker. The work needed to feel handmade and a little haunted, as beautiful as the costumes and as unafraid of the dark.

We built St. Joan a brand as brutal as it is beautiful, pulling from New Orleans and the shop's own taste for the dark. Gothic, moody, and detailed, it reads like the work of someone who makes gorgeous things with a little menace in them, which is exactly what St. Joan does. The system runs across a suite of intricate badges and marks, hang tags, packaging, business cards, and print, each piece carrying the same handmade, slightly sinister elegance. Nothing about it is cute or safe. It leans all the way into the maker's one rule, get weird with it, and treats craft and darkness as the same thing. The result gave a one-of-a-kind costume house a brand as strange and beautiful as the work that comes out of it.