Felipe Oliveira Baptista Profiles

Felipe Oliveira Baptista (born in 1975) is a Portuguese fashion designer. He was born in 1975 on the Portuguese Atlantic archipelago of the Azores, graduated from Kingston University in London, and founded his own label in 2003. This profiles page tells his story in order: the island birth, the London training, the apprenticeship years at three established houses, and the Paris label that followed. Of all the pages in this series, this is the one the others depend on.

He now lives and works in Paris. The biography searches in the references gather the wider career coverage, and the collections, runway and news pages in this series file the work the career produced.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.

Kingston, Max Mara, Lemaire and Cerruti

Baptista graduated from Kingston University in London, where he studied design and fashion design. Thereafter he worked for Max Mara, Christophe Lemaire and Cerruti — a training that moved between Italian ready-to-wear, a Paris design studio and a heritage tailoring house before he committed to a label of his own. In 2003, he founded his own label and settled in Paris, where he lives and works with his wife and two children.

The sequence matters to the clothes filed in this series: a designer formed in London, seasoned in Italy and Paris, and launched under his own name in the French capital carries all three educations into every collection — the collections page files the results season by season.

Haute Couture Week, Ready-to-Wear and Lacoste

In 2005, Baptista showed at Haute Couture Week in Paris for the first time, which marked the beginning of a relationship that would see the Fédération Française de la Couture invite him to Shanghai to exhibit his work two years later. He is a member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. Baptista debuted his accessories line and staged his first ready-to-wear show at Paris Fashion Week in 2009.

Alongside his own label he has taken part in high-profile collaborations, including 'AW77' with Nike — which also commissioned a book — and a collaboration with Uniqlo in 2006. His collections have been sold in stores such as Colette and Galeries Lafayette in Paris and Podium in Moscow. In 2010 he was appointed creative manager of Lacoste. Read with the collections page, the profile completes its arc: the Azores-born, Kingston-trained designer who built a Paris label of his own and carried it onto the couture calendar.