Page Three Hundred              

Can you give us an intro on your names and where you are based?
We are Gabriele Marchi and Maria Fernanda Barbero. We are based in Turin, in north of Italy.


You are a clothing label and a studio. What made you decide to do both clothing and graphic design? Which started first?
We consider graphic design and fashion design like two sides of the same coin: they are different disciplines working with different media, but they communicate in a complementary way the same message and the same attitude. We began with both graphic design (Gabriele Marchi) and fashion design (Maria Fernanda Barbero) since they are our main interests and areas of competence. Clearly this two fields are not so strictly distinct, so there is space to overlap them, and to make them work together in an organic way (for example we often apply typography on textiles).

We founded Page Three Hundred because, after working for a while on commissioned projects, we felt the necessity to do something independent from marketing restrictions or constraints deriving from sale’s logic, something that could be more experimental (and fun).


How did the name Page Three Hundred come about?
We are much more interested in the subjective interpretations of a content rather then in its didactic - objective description. It’s inevitable that, as human being, we are led to attribute meanings and try to find logical explanations for what is not immediately and clearly understandable. There’s an expression of Matthew Sullivan stating: “a half thought out expression is always heard by another as a whole expression”; we are fascinated by the ambiguity of how a decontextualized message can be perceived and comprehended, even enriched and completed by the reader.

This kind of approach strongly affects the way we conceive our own work: we constantly try to embrace incoherence and non-linearity, to legitimize them.

So the name Page Three Hundred reflects this method, this philosophy. A page is a physical support on which an idea can be concretized, expressed, spread. From the Holy Bible to Mein Kampf. Three Hundred is the non-idea, the non-message. Like any other number, it is pure, sterile, aseptic nonsense. It is a definite link in an endless chain. It is ordered, but meaningless. It is the paradox of a signifier which lacks any signified. It means nothing but itself.


How would you describe your design style?
Our approach to design is defined by an aesthetic and visual language of late modernist origin, and by a non-linear narrative and a disruptive - nonsense attitude typical of postmodern thought.

Our way is heavily based on principles of handmade and DIY production, so pretty much everything we produce is crafted by our own hands when is possible: from our business cards — hand printed with rubber stamps — to our garments, designed, cut and sewn with a sartorial approach.


Where else can we find you?
www.pagethreehundred.com
www.behance.net/pagethreehundred
www.pagethreehundred.tumblr.com
www.facebook.com/pagethreehundred
www.ello.co/pagethreehundred