We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dave Faluna. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dave below.
Dave, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
Doing anything creative is a risk. At first, I wasn’t planning to start Faluna. I thought that fashion was too risky, and that I had to do only the “traditional” path. And then I had a health scare. Everything’s fine now, but there’s this moment that you have, when you are hit with your mortality. You think about your life not just in present tense but in past, as well. You think to yourself “how would people speak about me if I passed today?”. And in that moment, I knew that the things that I felt were risky, paled in comparison to the much greater threat of having people tell the wrong stories about me. At some point I decided that even if I tried and failed, at least I would be known for my passions, and when a success that deep in meaningful underlies even failure, there wasn’t nearly as much risk as I initially feared.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I’m a young-ish QPoC creator. I own and started Faluna, which I would describe as fashion on the edge of fantasy. My dream growing up was to be a character designer. Not long ago, while working on my first novel, I was really missing the visual component that I had fallen in love with all those years ago when I was drawing comics every chance I got. I had an epiphany, that fashion is just character design for real people. From then on, when I started Faluna, I knew that I wanted to make clothes that are just normal enough that they feel comfortable on a rack. I dream of making bold clothes on the boundary of everyday wear. My first garment, The Empress Top, is available now. Making it happen was way more difficult (time intensive, and expensive), than I thought it would be. But, as I’ve learned, sometimes a bit of naivety is needed to start on anything so challenging.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
To me support for the arts really comes down to three things: developed palate, money in circulation, and accessibility.
One: Great art doesn’t stand out from lower quality to recipients who aren’t yet discerning enough to tell the difference. I think about wine in this example. While I understand that there is wine that is incredibly valuable, I’m not certain that I could tell you a world class bottle from a grocery store wine if you hid the label from me. Just because I can’t, doesn’t mean the quality difference isn’t there, and it’s not a reflection of the value of either bottle. It just means that I need to refine my palate more to be able to appreciate the hard work and quality of art in that form.
Two: Being an artist is expensive and uncertain, and there’s no way around it. To support artists, we just need a world where more money is going out for good and/or indie art. As individuals we need to be comfortable seeking out those artists and paying for what their time is worth, and as a society I think that we need programs that support artists (especially new artists), as they try to get their footing.
Three: Art needs to be more accessible. In the ways that we find artists, in the work that gets chosen for galleries, in the price of viewing and location of where art is displayed, and the type of art that we teach about and to whom.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
There’s a lot of really cool stuff going on in my head, and quite simply, I want to show it to other people.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Faluna.Shop
- Instagram: FalunaOfficial
Image Credits
N/A