That question hovers over Off Balance, the new label by Croatian designer Andrea Morell, premiering September 11 at Zagreb Design Week, with its debut drop set for September 12.
The show will open with Marija Vukašina, the Zadar-born model whose presence has become ritual in Morell’s presentations. Scouted at 17 after entering the Miss Zadar County pageant, Vukašina has since built a career that now positions her as one of Croatia’s most visible beauty ambassadors. She carried Croatian symbols at Miss Tourism World 2023 in China and placed in the top 15 at Beauty of the World 2024, where she won the “Miss Charm” title.
This 12th edition of Zagreb Design Week brings streetwear with a twist. Morell launches her first commercial line, Off Balance, a brand of limited drops designed as much for collecting as for wearing.
But Off Balance is not about neat resolutions. Its vocabulary is one of dualities: preppy collides with nocturnal, couture folds into hoodies, minimalism is slashed open by a maximalist gesture.
Instead of chasing symmetry, Off Balance leans into what is slightly wrong.
Sleeves hang just a fraction too long, a seam slants where the eye expects straightness, typography slightly off center. Moss grows where it shouldn’t as disruption. Nothing is broken, yet nothing is whole. It is fashion in a state of unease, where beauty arrives through the interruption, the perfect imperfection.
“Clothes shouldn’t resolve contradictions,” Morell tells us. “They should embody them.”
This is the core of Off Balance: fashion not as correction, but as mirror. Every garment holds two truths at once – elegance and disorder, strength and fragility, preppy polish and nocturnal edge. The brand rejects the illusion of harmony and instead insists on the friction that defines real life.
Morell treats each piece less as a product than as an artifact. Drops are limited, garments signed, every release functioning as both streetwear and collectible. In an era of overproduction, Off Balance insists on scarcity.
In a culture that constantly promises balance yet delivers chaos, Morell dares to propose another answer: that imbalance itself may be the only authentic state of being. Off Balance dresses those who live at the intersection of contradictions – who find identity not in smooth surfaces, but in the cracks where tension and beauty coexist.
