Marie-Charlotte ft. Under the Same Sky
Marie-Charlotte Vermeulen works at fashion house Natan, led by her uncle Edouard Vermeulen. Alongside that, she has spent the past two years building her own label, 11 PM, with her best friend Pieterjan Van Biesen. For Under the Same Sky, we didn’t ask her about the work. We asked something harder to answer: how do you stay grounded in a world that refuses to sit still?
Her answer starts in London. Eight years, when the plan had only ever been one. “The moment I arrived, I knew this was a place where I’d find myself,” she says. She worked her way through Net-a-Porter, then Selfridges, eventually running the womenswear studio. “Nobody there knew my name. No preconceptions waiting for me, no expectations to live up to. That felt like freedom.”
Working in fashion leaves little room to switch off. Everything moves fast, and staying present means staying alert. “Sometimes I deliberately switch to autopilot, just to protect myself,” she says. Not a weakness, she’s quick to clarify, more of a survival tactic. “The moment my mind starts spinning, it doesn’t stop on its own. I end up overthinking everything, turning it over and over.”
“The life I’d built there was entirely my own, completely separate from everything I already had here.”
Slowing down, she’s learned, reveals things that speed usually hides. Family, for instance, isn’t something she defines by blood. “My two closest friends, they’re the family I chose for myself. They pick up on how I’m doing without me having to say a single word.”
It wasn’t the years abroad that made her see how much she’d changed. It was the return. “The life I’d built there was entirely my own, completely separate from everything I already had here,” she says. “I came back knowing I was a different version of myself.”
That same need, a moment that belongs to no one but her, resurfaces in something far smaller, something she never leaves home without. “I always have sunglasses with me,” she says. “The second I put them on, something shifts, a kind of quiet strength settles in. When what you feel inside matches what you’re wearing, that’s when you actually feel good.” For Marie-Charlotte, the Altair is never just an accessory. It carries the same logic as London, only smaller: proof that feeling entirely like yourself can be as simple as putting something on.
