The Story Behind "Some Stories Survive Only in How We Carry Ourselves"

This was the first poster in the Un/Spoken collection, and in many ways it set the tone for everything that followed.

The idea came from watching people — not famous people, not historical figures — just ordinary people walking through their day with something unmistakable in the way they moved. A posture that said more than any biography could. An older man at a café in Bologna who sat like someone who had once commanded a room. A young woman on the metro in Milan reading with the kind of stillness that suggested she had learned it the hard way.

We don't always get to tell our stories. Sometimes we lose the words, or the audience, or the moment. But the story doesn't disappear. It settles into your shoulders, your hands, the way you hold a door open or look someone in the eye.

The illustration draws from 19th-century engraving traditions — the kind of portraits that were made before photography, when an artist had to decide what about a person was worth preserving. The woman in the print isn't posing. She's simply standing, holding a single flower, wearing clothes that mix discipline with softness — a military-style jacket paired with a flowing floral skirt, a wide-brim hat that frames her face without hiding it. She carries her story in her silhouette.

There's something powerful about a person who doesn't explain themselves. Not out of arrogance or secrecy, but because the explanation lives in the way they move, the way they pause, the way they hold space. You've met people like this. You remember them not for what they said, but for how it felt to be near them.

That's what this quote means to us. Some stories don't need to be spoken. They survive in how we carry ourselves — and that's enough.

View the print → Some Stories Survive Only in How We Carry Ourselves