If you ask a Romanian about “bulendre”, they’ll think of bags of old clothes, not a catwalk. Now imagine the same word said as if it were French. It almost becomes a chic brand! You could picture it on a perfume bottle. That gap between meaning and sound is why I chose it. I’m less interested in the illusion around clothes and more in what the data underneath actually shows.

I didn’t start with a grand plan to “fix” fashion. It began with a simple realisation: the way we make and buy clothes today is brand new in historical terms. For centuries, garments were built slowly, altered over time, and made for a specific person. Now, in only a few decades, we’ve normalised fast cycles, global supply chains, and closets full of items we barely wear.

I’m not trying to turn that past into a fairy tale, and I’m not interested in attacking specific companies. Some brands are clearly trying to change things. But the system as a whole still causes enormous harm. The old world won’t return, and there’s no point crying over an idealised version of it.

Since we can’t roll history back, I prefer to focus on what’s left in our hands: the data these systems produce every day. What we do have are the footprints this system leaves behind: prices, inventories, shipping routes, working hours, ratings, returns. All of that is data.

My focus is on using that data, with the skills I currently have, to ask small, concrete questions about how fashion works today and how it might work better tomorrow. Bulendre.org is where I document those questions and experiments, project by project, as a junior data analyst who believes that better information can support better decisions.