Beautiful by Design is a method, a standard, and a new way of seeing. Rekia & Joséphine begins with a simple proposition: textured hair should shape the design from its very first line. Its textures, movement, and possibilities guide the process from beginning to end. That principle is expressed through decisions most people may never consciously notice. La Rivière’s dark filament recedes into black and brown hair, allowing the pearls to hold the eye with little evidence of the structure beneath them.

Beautiful by Design also extends beyond the object and into the way Black beauty is presented. The hairstyles we show, including cornrows, coils, locs, braids, curls, afros, and shaved heads, form the visual language of the brand, each one carrying its own architecture, movement, and expression. Everything here is intentional: the construction, the image, and the woman at the centre of it.

La Rivière was the first piece Rekia & Joséphine created and the one that established the standard for everything that would follow. Its name comes from the French "rivière de perles", the classic river of pearls, and from the movement of the piece itself: a fine line of pearls that appears to flow through the hair rather than rest on top of it. Each pearl is strung on a dark filament as fine as a single strand of hair, sourced with extraordinary care because a thread that truly recedes into black and brown hair is far more difficult to find than a clear one. It allows the structure to disappear, so the pearls remain visible, suspended and seemingly weightless, with little evidence of what holds them in place.

Every La Rivière is made entirely by hand in Toronto, one piece at a time, through approximately seven hours of precise and patient work. Japanese pearls are individually strung and finished with sterling silver findings, with every placement considered and every piece given the time its construction requires. La Rivière was created to be lived in rather than reserved for a single occasion. It moves through braids, locs, coils, curls, wigs, weaves, and sleek styles, worn to a wedding, a gallery, a dinner, or an ordinary day made more intentional. It was designed for the woman whose relationship with her hair may shift across the seasons of her life and made to move with her through each one.

French-Beninese designer Romance Vlavonou was born and raised in Metz, a French border city where languages, cultures, and histories have long existed alongside one another. Her years in Paris and Strasbourg deepened an understanding of what it means to move between worlds while absorbing the elegance of her family’s matriarchs, the beauty rituals of the Black women around her, and the art and architecture that would later shape her approach to design. The sculptural lines of cornrows, coils, locs, braids, and shaved heads became some of her earliest visual references, held in memory long before she began creating pieces of her own.

Rekia & Joséphine was founded in 2025, although its central idea had been taking shape for years. The brand carries Romance’s belief that Black beauty belongs at the centre of product design and image-making into material form. Named for her two grandmothers and informed by the grace, ritual, and strength of the matriarchs who came before her, Rekia & Joséphine is both a tribute to lineage and a continuation of it: a collection of intentional hair adornments created to elevate Afro-heritage hairstyles and honour the beauty already present within them. Through her work, Romance presents Black beauty as freedom, legacy, and inheritance, something to be protected, adorned, and carried forward.