Airon Martin grew up in Sinop, a small city deep in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, far from any fashion capital. Far from any inherited idea of what a designer is supposed to look like or where they are supposed to come from. He was raised by the women in his family in a household that had little money and a great deal of character. That environment, its strength, its complexity, its particular way of moving through the world, became the foundation for everything he would eventually build.
That origin story matters, not as biography but as design logic. Everything Misci does, the way it dresses bodies, the materials it chooses, the cultural references it insists on, traces back to that upbringing in Brazil’s interior. Far from the fashion industry of São Paulo and far from any inherited idea of what luxury is supposed to look like.
Martin did not begin his career in fashion. Prompted by a need for financial stability and the pressure to fit expectations, he left Sinop to study law, then abandoned that to pursue medicine in Buenos Aires. It was in that city that he encountered design and fashion in a way he never had before. He returned to São Paulo and enrolled at the Istituto Europeo di Design, training first as a furniture designer. That background gave him something most fashion designers do not have: a structural understanding of how objects occupy space, how materials behave over time, how form and function create meaning together. You feel it in every collection.
In 2018, Misci was born, presented initially as his graduation project, a multidisciplinary design studio combining fashion and furniture within the same creative process. The name is a contraction of miscegenation, the mixing of races and cultures that defines Brazilian identity more honestly than any postcard image of carnival or beach, worn openly, without apology, as both identity and manifesto.
Martin’s own background tells the story of the brand better than any mission statement could. His lineage is Brazilian in the most literal sense: indigenous, Black, and Italian blood running together in a single person from the interior of Mato Grosso. He did not choose to make a brand about miscegenation as a concept. He simply made a brand about himself, and he happens to be the most honest portrait of what Brazil actually is. In a country still working through the complexity of its history, that is not a small gesture.
From the beginning, Misci operated on its own terms. The brand rejects the traditional fashion calendar, supports tribal communities fighting for the Amazon rainforest’s protection, and works with a network of certified local producers of natural materials. This is not marketing language. The pirarucu leather, the open-weave constructions from discarded fishing nets, the naturally colored cotton, the Amazonian latex worked as textile. All of it comes from years of genuine research into what Brazil actually produces and what it means to bring those materials into a luxury context without sanitizing their origin.
The international fashion industry took notice. Martin has appeared on the most prestigious global lists of designers shaping the future of the industry, and the brand’s client list crosses politics, entertainment, and culture in a way that few labels manage. Brazilian first lady Rosângela Lula da Silva has worn Misci for public appearances. Oprah Winfrey famously walked into his São Paulo boutique and left with three Bambolo handbags. Rosalía has worn the brand. So has performer and activist Indya Moore. The range of those names tells you something important: this is a label that crosses the political and the cultural, the Brazilian and the global, without compromising either end.
The show that brought us to Rio felt like a statement of arrival. Misci became the first fashion brand to use the Sambadrome Marquês de Sapucaí as a runway, presenting the collection “Escapismo Tropical” with eighty drummers from the Beija-Flor de Nilópolis samba school playing live. Taking a wardrobe rooted in Brazil’s interior to the Sapuca felt like an act of reclamation. A designer insisting that the regional codes long undervalued by the cultural establishment in Rio and São Paulo belong on the same ground as the country’s most celebrated cultural export. Standing inside that space as the drums began, watching the runway in Misci’s signature blue cut across the avenue like a line of horizon, it was impossible not to feel the weight of what Martin was doing. He wasn’t dressing a fantasy of Brazil. He was insisting on the real one.
The Clothes
What Martin actually puts on a body is worth dwelling on because the cultural narrative around Misci can sometimes overshadow just how good the design is on its own terms.
His silhouettes are generous without being loose, structured without being rigid. There is a fluidity to the tailoring that comes directly from his furniture background, an understanding of how a garment needs to move with a body. The way a well-designed chair needs to meet a body rather than impose itself on one. The cuts tend towards the wide and the considered, with strong shoulders that feel authoritative rather than costumed. Silk appears regularly, worked into classic constructions to lighten them, to give familiar forms a tropical ease without sacrificing their precision.
Photos: Ze Takahashi
The materials are where Misci separates itself most clearly from the rest of Brazilian fashion. Pirarucu leather, sourced from one of the Amazon’s largest freshwater fish and worked into boots, bags, and accessories, has a texture and weight unlike anything produced in Europe. Jute swimwear. Open-weave fabrication from discarded fishing nets. Amazonian latex reworked as a usable surface. These are not experimental gestures. They are commercial products that happen to come from one of the most biodiverse places on earth, brought into the vocabulary of luxury fashion without losing their origin.
The collections read across genders without ever making that a statement. Men and women wear the same silhouettes, the same references, the same materials. It is not androgyny as concept but plurality as fact, which is the whole point of the Misci name from the beginning.
In the front row that evening was Lenny Niemeyer, the woman who over 35 years built Brazilian beachwear into a global luxury category. Two designers from entirely different generations, entirely different worlds within Brazilian fashion, present for each other. There is something in that image that says more about where this industry is heading than any trend report could. Brazilian fashion is not competing with itself. It is building something together.
Martin understands something rare in fashion: that what he is selling is not just clothing but a proposition about an entire country, its complexity, its beauty, its refusal to be reduced to a single image. That clarity of purpose is what makes Misci feel different from everything around it.
There are brands that take decades to earn that word and never quite get there. Martin got there by refusing to make fashion that could have come from anywhere else. Every material, every silhouette, every cultural reference points back to the same place: a country far more complex and far more beautiful than the version the world has always been sold. Misci is the correction. And it’s just getting started.
Check the newest collection on Misci’s official website.
Header photo by Pedro Napolinario.
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Last Updated on June 5, 2026 by Editorial Team