The X series

Creating a heritage-focused apparel brand

The challenge

The primary challenge in building a heritage-focused brand is overcoming the tendency to treat cultural stories as rigid, museum-bound artifacts or monolithic political narratives. When heritage is presented as a fixed relic, it becomes inaccessible, outdated, and resistant to change; alienating the contemporary audience it seeks to inspire. As a museologist, I kept asking the same question: what would it look like if heritage stepped off the wall and onto the street?

The observation

Kings are the most familiar and the most misread

We all learned about them in school. Kings, rulers, leaders of state; they are the most visible figures in the historical canon, and also the most flattened. Reduced to dates and battles, their complexity gets lost. The bias is baked in.

What interested me was the tension between familiarity and mythology. These are figures everyone recognises but nobody really knows. And crucially — who counts as "our" king is itself a contested question. Including Franz Joseph, the Austro-Hungarian emperor that Hungarians never fully claimed as their own, was an intentional provocation. Heritage is not a fixed truth. It is a negotiation.

The creative concept

Our identity is shaped as much by our origins as by our aspirations

Heritage should not be a static relic preserved in ivory. It is a living dialogue; one that remains relevant by being recontextualised, challenged, and worn. The X Series is a self-initiated concept for a heritage-focused streetwear brand built around limited drops. X marks exclusivity. Each series is a capsule; a small, considered set of pieces that could expand to other chapters of Hungarian and regional history.

The first series features Hungarian kings, each reduced to their most recognisable features (crown, beard, posture) rendered in stark geometric linework with gold accents. Minimal enough to wear, detailed enough to reward a second look. The visual language sits deliberately at the intersection of historical illustration and contemporary graphic design: neither museum poster nor generic streetwear. The packaging continues the same logic, utilitarian in form, finished with a golden hand-drawn typeface. The physical object is designed to feel like a transition from museum vitrine to modern wardrobe.