Our Story
Our story began while we were both building something of our own.
Jane had just launched her fashion business, Ipseity, and was busy organising pop-up shops, photoshoots and events. At the same time, Luca was starting Yellow Cactus, his equipment rental business for shoots, events and productions.
While planning one of her events, Jane found herself searching for what she described as “a box where you plug in all the cables for the speakers.” As luck would have it, Luca knew exactly what she meant and, more importantly, he had a mixer.
Things escalated fairly quickly after the mixer, and Jane soon moved for love to live with Luca, who at the time was living as a property guardian in a 500-square-metre warehouse with no heating… a setup that sounded wonderfully romantic until winter arrived and Jane discovered that the kitchen was somehow colder than the fridge. Surviving those months was one of her greatest early acts of devotion, although she quickly learnt that while love may warm the heart, it is considerably less effective at warming your hands, feet or any other part of the body when you live in an enormous concrete building in London.
Perhaps that experience should have revealed just how different (and strangely complementary) we are. Jane has unmistakable wild-cat energy, while Luca is very much a Labrador: friendly, enthusiastic and always ready for the next adventure. Luca is a vegetarian (apart from the small-print exception that applies whenever he visits la belle famille in Normandy), while Jane simply doesn’t eat vegetables, making every shared meal a minor exercise in negotiation. He is a quiet extrovert; she is a loud introvert. He loves the mountains; she belongs by the sea. Jane wants to dance to commercial music she can sing along to, or spend the night in a salsa bar, while Luca would happily disappear for days into an indie electronic festival where the songs rarely have any words to sing in the first place.
Somehow, our differences don’t pull us in opposite directions; they encourage us to explore places, experiences and sides of life that neither of us might have discovered alone. We may not always agree on the music, the menu or whether the next holiday should involve hiking boots or a swimsuit, but we share the same curiosity, the same appetite for adventure and, most importantly, the ability to laugh our way through almost anything.
For Jane, Luca is the perfect partner because he loves a challenge and quickly gets bored without one; fortunately, Jane loves giving Luca challenges and quickly gets bored when everything is too easy, so this arrangement works beautifully for everyone (or at least for Jane!). In Human Design, Jane is Luca’s compass and Luca is Jane’s engine: he gives our relationship the energy to keep moving forwards, while she makes sure we are travelling in the right direction, which means we can go very far together, even if there are occasional debates about the route and absolutely no agreement on the playlist.
Seven years later, that mixer is far from the only thing we’ve shared. These years have been packed with emotion and a never-ending whirlwind of experiences, each one tying us closer together. We’ve driven through the night from Oxfordshire to London during a storm, with trees threatening to fall around us; survived a Latin American work tour that felt like an episode of The Traitors; created our first audiovisual collaboration for Soho House; and endured the eight-month process of buying our almost-derelict, fire-damaged flat in London; to name a few.
