When Chufy found Rossy: two friends, an island and a fashion collection

“Everything has come out at Rossy’s speed”, explains Sofía Sánchez de Betak about the capsule collection she has just made in collaboration with Rossy de Palma. “We did the look book In an hour. It’s that she, look at her, she has everything very clear”, she comments as she points to the actress, who is tying several scarves around her waist and telling the photographer of the session exactly how she wants to pose. Chufy, Sánchez de Betak’s brand and the nickname by which she has been known since she was a child, was born in 2017 as a firm of flowing garments and colorful prints that invite, says the designer, to have a “holiday, relaxed and optimistic attitude, although be in the city”. They are designed in Argentina, their country of origin, with a team of 12 people. The garments are produced by hand in India.

What began five years ago as a modest brand, almost like a hobby, inspired by Sofia’s multiple trips, is today a medium-sized company that sells in temples of luxury such as The Webster, Saks or Faline Tokyo and that dresses Alicia Keys, Liv Tyler and Blake Lively, among many others. “When the pandemic started I thought about leaving it, because something told me that it was not going to be a matter of two months. I made numbers to pay settlements, and the day I was going to meet with my team to tell them, I don’t know what happened to me, I did the opposite: I told my design director that we needed to have everything in a week. And here we continue”.

It was during those months that he realized that he did not want to create alone. “And most of all I didn’t want the focus of the brand to be me,” she says. In addition to being a businesswoman, she is an art director and digital consultant; her Instagram has almost half a million followers. Last year she carried out a collaboration with the graffiti artist André Saraiva. This time, Rossy de Palma has been chosen. “I wouldn’t call it a collaboration, it’s more of an inspiration. She presented me with ideas and I was choosing. The merit is hers”, comments the actress, singer and model. “Her main starting point was Chinese opera, which reminds me a lot of her,” says the designer. Later, De Palma specified images and lowered the colors. “Because I already have a very trained eye for these things, and I know that Chufita and my daughter Luna like them more neutral,” says the actress.

They have been friends for years and both recognize that, deep down, all this has been an excuse to spend more time together. I know Alex [marido de Sofía y creador de la agencia Bureau Betak] since I was 17 years old because he used to do Sybilla’s parades. That is why they bought a house in Deià, because they have always been very close to Mallorca”, recalls the interpreter born 57 years ago in Palma, who recalls: “Chufy contacted me a long time ago, when he lived in New York, to participate in the campaign for a luxury perfumery in Buenos Aires. And that’s where we connected.” Carrying out this collaboration has allowed her to reconnect with her past: “I would say that before being an artist, I am an artisan. All my life I have made clothes because everything was so expensive. First she made dresses that she sold at the market in Mallorca hanging from a tree. Then I started drawing designs that, look, have become fashionable years later”. Rossy de Palma acknowledges that now she is lucky enough to say: “Do this to me, and they do it to me”, but she does not rule out materializing those sketches that she sketched in the nineties and that she keeps. That yes, always collaborating with others, “because in the end it is the beautiful thing, to inspire and to be inspired”.