The original post was titled "When in Romania, Enjoy Vicious Candy and Drake's Mixtape," which is a sentence that could only have been written in 2009 by someone who was twenty-something and had a lot going on that summer.
Three down, six more to go before things settle down. That's what I wrote to open it. I was counting down something, I don't remember what. I had devoted the summer to experience instead of writing. The writing would come later, in the cold Boston winter.
Vicious Candy deserved a better entry point than that.
The brand was Romanian, which in 2009 was a genuinely unusual origin for a label getting attention in the US independent fashion space. Eastern European design was not on the radar of most fashion bloggers. I found it because I was paying attention to things that weren't in the obvious pipeline. I should say: the label is gone now, as far as I can tell. Searching the name today mostly turns up an unrelated streetwear brand, and I couldn't find an archive of the original site. So this is memory, plus my old post.
What I wrote about the clothes: colorful, structured, a little aggressive in the best way. The name was accurate. There was something sharp underneath the sweetness. Silhouettes that had opinions.
Where the references came from
What I'd add now: Romania has a distinct textile history, the embroidered ie blouse) being only the most famous example, and Vicious Candy was drawing on that lineage whether explicitly or not. The pattern work, the color relationships, these weren't arbitrary. They came from somewhere.
In 2026, the question of where design references come from has legal weight it didn't have in 2009. The EU AI Act puts transparency obligations on the training data behind generative models, something I've covered in more detail in my piece on training data. And the long-running effort at WIPO around traditional cultural expressions is slowly building a vocabulary for who gets to use traditional motifs commercially, and on what terms. It's unfinished work, but it's moving.
Designers who knew where their references came from, who could trace the lineage of their aesthetic choices, are in a better position now than designers who borrowed without knowing they were borrowing. I made a version of this argument about Zelaya, a designer working from San Salvador, around the same time.
Vicious Candy felt like it knew. The clothes had that quality of grounded reference, even when the context around them was chaotic.
The Drake mixtape was good too, for the record. That part holds up.