What hasn’t Constança been up to? Back-to-back collaborations all show the full range of the designer’s talents: acrylic and textiles with architect Duarte Caldas for Lisbon Design Week, woven tire strips with artist Marie Hazard for New York gallery Studio2M, archival prints for the 120th birthday of Porto’s Livraria Lello, full interiors for a new bar called Bela, and the inaugural merch collection Lauren Kennedy’s Castle Hihihi. All in the last year and running parallel to her fashion brand, the eponymous Constança Entrudo, a fixture of Portuguese womenswear since 2018.
The irony is that throughout these projects and for the better part of 2025, Constança Entrudo had no studio: ‘We moved ten thousand times, she laughs. With every move, Constança and her core team of 5 became experts in making every new space function and feel consistent; the same notebook, the same pen, the same mug, every tool in the right place for work to carry on. Living on the edge like this has its creative payoff — last year, Constança set up an exhibition in Biarritz with nothing but boxes — but also, naturally, constantly boxing and unboxing proved to be a draining experience for all.
So, after a long and hard search all over Lisbon, Constança bought a space she had seen and loved on the day they moved out of their last permanent studio in Campolide, just around the corner. Formerly the studio of architects ‘etc project’, the labyrinthine nature of the place grew on Constança as the year’s search went on. At the street level, the glass shop doors open into a shock pink showroom displaying racks of current and former collections. Downstairs, the workspace is split over and over into rooms and divisions. The sewing room on one side and a bright work room plastered with images, references, phrases on the other. Light streams past a small brutalist tropical-ish garden into the kitchen where Constanca starts every day with coffee and news. The floor plan’s many entrances and exits, which seemed at first a downside compared to the open-plan space she had envisioned, have actually created a warm and convivial atmosphere of comings and goings for the team.
Here, at last, the notebooks, the pens, the mugs and all the tools of Constança’s ever evolving trade are permanently in place and ready to get to work.
Pictures by Matilde Travassos
