We were lucky to catch up with Oscar Ruiz-Schmidt recently and have shared our conversation below.

Oscar, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

It is absolutely important you learn all the basics in the craft so you can later break some rules and get away with it. My mom made her own clothes for many years and she would sit at the kitchen table sewing away many evenings after dinner. She could make for herself pretty much anything she saw in a magazine and I always thought she was the coolest mom for that.

Oscar, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m from Liberia, in the northern province of Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Since I was little I was drawing all the time and all through high school I kept super busy in my room making illustrations in colored pencils that I would sell at a local bookstore, so from a young age I found out that I could make hand made stuff and people would like it and buy it. In highschool I also got into macramé, making friendship bracelets that I would speedily craft during lunch recess and make a buck after, then of course tie-dyed t-shirts with hand-painted texts and drawings and cutting up thrift store finds to make unique things that nobody else had. I moved to San José, the capital, for college and got into Art School and explored many techniques and processes and just fell more in love with creativity. After I got my degree in Graphic Design with a minor in Ceramics, I started working at a newspaper and my first job was doing layout for the Obituary section, so I joke saying that my first graphic design clients were all dead. Quickly I moved into the magazine department and landed a job as photography producer for the fashion editorials and developed a keen interest more in the garments being displayed than the set up where they were being photographed. At age 29 after having tried multiple times to get a scholarship in different countries, I moved to Berlin to attend Kunsthochschule Weißensee which changed the course of my life. It was then and there I became aware of sustainability in fashion and figuring out new ways of making clothes without harming the environment and got heavily into Zero Waste Design and haven’t given up on it ever since.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I would recommend the book Zero Waste Design by Timo Rissanen and Holy McQuillan and the community at https://www.zwdc.org/

of which Holy is also a co-founder

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

It is absolutely saddening to watch the overflow of clothing consumption and the use of synthetics in the industry. I’ve been spending time in my hometown this summer and was shocked to see how many new thrift stores there are, selling junk from first world countries, mostly polyester, that have affected local production and manufacturing and replaced it with rubbish. I know it might be impossible to defeat, but Im here to create a value proposition against all that and to propose conscious consumption. Vivienne Westwood said it best, buy less, choose well, demand more.

Contact Info:

• Website: obra-gris.com
• Instagram: obragris

Image Credits
Photography by Juan Tribaldos juantribaldos.com