Built from Obsession: Inside the Visionary World of Aries with Sofia Prantera
Sofia Prantera didn’t set out to create a streetwear brand. Aries came to life naturally from a need to create without compromise. As a seasoned designer with a deep love for subcultures, symbolism, and the space where fashion meets art, Sofia has carved a unique path through an often male-dominated industry. In this interview, she reflects on the gravity that pulled her back into design, the quiet challenges of being a female founder in streetwear, and the power of staying radically true to your voice. With Aries, she is not just making clothes. She is shaping a cultural language, one graphic at a time.
Can you tell us a bit about the journey that led you to found Aries Arise? What inspired you to start this brand?
It wasn’t so much a lightbulb moment as a gradual pull like gravity, but with graphics :). After Silas, I took a step back. I was raising my kids and trying to freelance, but I realised I’d become totally unemployable. I’d been in charge of my own vision for too long. Aries came out of that need to create without compromise. I didn’t sit down with a spreadsheet and say, “Let’s make a streetwear brand.” It grew out of my obsession with clothes, subcultures, design, and that weird space where art meets fashion. There was this serendipity too, Instagram launched around the same time, and suddenly you could speak in images, not just words. That gave Aries a visual language, a way to communicate without over-explaining
Have you encountered any specific challenges as a female founder in the streetwear scene? How did those experiences shape your approach to the brand?
Of course. Streetwear has always been a very male space. Back in the Slam City Skates, days, we invented a fictional male founder, Silas Holmes, because it felt easier to be taken seriously I couldn’t imagine a cool brand run by a small Italian woman. That says a lot. But I never experienced outright sexism, everyone around me was always so lovely, looking back now it was there but you realise it’s more subtle, it’s cultural, you are also putting yourself in that space, like being adjacent to something rather than central. That distance gave me a kind of freedom, though. I could build something on my own terms. I think there was also a discomfort with being looked at, especially growing up in Italy where attention on young women is relentless, also fed into Aries’s oversized silhouettes and genderless fits. It was protective as much as it was aesthetic.
How important is it to stay true to yourself and your vision in the fashion industry, and how can young designers find their unique voice?
It’s everything. The industry moves fast and it’s very trend-led, but if you’re just following what everyone else is doing, you get lost in the noise. Your uniqueness becomes your currency, not in a branding sense, but in a cultural one. My advice? Get obsessed. Go deep into your thing. Whether it’s rave flyers, Brutalist architecture, or Turkish psychedelia, whatever weird, specific stuff you love, that’s where your originality lives. And try to stay off autopilot. Social media makes it easy to end up in an echo chamber of your own taste. Sometimes I start a fresh Instagram account just to see things outside my algorithm. It’s about keeping yourself inspired and your eyes fresh.
What legacy do you hope to leave with Aries Arise in terms of influence on both fashion and culture?
I’d love Aries to be remembered as a brand that didn’t try to please everyone but still connected deeply. Something that pushed the visual language of streetwear forward. That made space for subcultures and for people who didn’t see themselves in traditional fashion narratives. For me, Aries is a long-form project. It’s clothing, it’s process, part art experiment. If it’s sparked even one kid to think, “Maybe I could do something like this,” then that’s a real legacy.
What’s a piece of advice you received in your career that really stuck with you?
My mum alway told me to take anything that came my way, “Don’t wait until you feel ready.” There’s this urge to over-prepare, to prove yourself. But the truth is, nobody really knows what they’re doing at the beginning. You learn by doing. That, and: don’t wash Aries sweatshirts at a high temperature. They’ll shrink, and someone’s teenager will never forgive you.
Lastly, if you could design a dream collaboration with any other brand or designer, who would it be and why?
That’s always a hard one, because collaboration, for me, isn’t really about chasing names. It has to come from a shared goal, a desire to make something new and unexpected. I think it would be really interesting to collaborate with a comic artist or even a video game. I love logos and symbols, so anything that lets me explore that language in a different medium is exciting.
I was once invited to lecture in Venice and work with the city’s symbolic architecture, the idea of collaborating with a city, with its history and visual codes, feels kind of magical. Or maybe something ugly and difficult, just to see where it leads. That tension, finding beauty in what feels wrong, is where the fun begins.
