The NUDE World Order: Misfits Are Having The Last Laugh.

Sophia Leon S.

6 hours ago

9 min read

Bruno Casanovas spent his childhood moving between worlds, never quite feeling at home. Then he and Alex Benlloch built NUDE Project, a community for people who felt the same. In conversation with ROE, Bruno talks about belonging, outsiderhood, ambition, Gen Z, love, and what happens when the outsiders build the place everyone wants to belong to.

Some people spend their lives looking for a place to belong. Bruno Casanovas and Alex Benlloch built one. What started as a student-room idea became a brand, then a community, then something much larger than either of them could have anticipated. But underneath the clothes, campaigns, stores and cultural universe is a much more personal story: the story of someone who spent much of his early life feeling like he was arriving somewhere only to discover that he had already left it behind.

So when I ask Bruno what belonging means to him, his answer has very little to do with fashion.

“I think belonging is humanity.”

He talks about tribes, about people gathering around shared values, about the fact that humans have always searched for their people.

“Humans don't exist as individuals. We exist as a community.”

For Bruno, this isn't an abstract theory. It is a biography.

He started going to Bali when he was seven and fully moved there at eleven, eventually spending around eight years in Indonesia before moving to Portugal and then Barcelona. He grew up between cultures, around people from dozens of different backgrounds, surfing before school and absorbing a worldview that was difficult to put back into one neat geographical box.

He describes growing up with a nomadic rhythm in which there was never quite one fixed place containing all the things that make somewhere feel like home: friends, family, relationships, work, routine.

“I never had that thing. I feel like a sense of belonging was always what I kept seeking.”

There is something so familiar in the way he describes it. Not belonging isn't necessarily about being rejected, sometimes it is simply the feeling that you are permanently translating yourself.

When I asked whether what he was really searching for was acceptance or understanding, he gravitated towards choosing the latter.

“I felt like I wanted to be understood. Not by everyone, but by a select group of people.”

The difference here really matters, because acceptance asks other people to let you in. Understanding asks them to actually see you.

For someone who grew up between cultures, that difference can become enormous, believe me I would know... Bruno talks about returning to Spain and feeling unable to connect with people on a deeper level because his reference points were so different. He calls it “a weird feeling going back to your home and not feeling home.”

Perhaps that is where the real origin story of NUDE Project begins: not in fashion, but in the loneliness of not quite finding your people.

The Outsider

There is a moment when I ask Bruno whether being an outsider was something he wanted to overcome when he was younger, or something he eventually learned to embrace.

His answer is immediate.

“I feel like being an outsider is cool as fuck.”

Then he laughs, and the important part comes after.

When he was a child, it didn't feel cool at all. Moving to Bali meant leaving his football team behind, starting over in a new country and learning English. At the time, there was no grand narrative about how all of this would eventually shape him. There was simply a kid wondering why his life had to keep changing.

“You can only connect the dots when you look back,” he says. “When you gain perspective.”

We have become very good at romanticising outsiderhood. We turn the strange kid into the future artist, the misfit into the visionary, the person who never fit in into the person who was simply too special for the room.

But Bruno remembers something less glamorous, that it hurt. Only later did he understand what that experience had given him.

He tells me that many of the people he admires most were outsiders. He starts talking about Steve Jobs, about how a life lived outside conventional structures can create a perspective that allows someone to see things differently. His point isn't that suffering automatically makes someone exceptional. It is that distance can change what you are able to see.

The brand's audience has often been described through the language of “misfits,” people who don't necessarily feel completely at home in the world they've been given. But perhaps the more interesting thing is that NUDE never really tells them to become less strange.

It tells them there might be value in the strangeness and power in authenticity.

The Walking Contradiction

There is another thing Bruno seems deeply unwilling to do: define himself too rigidly.

At one point in our conversation, he told me something he had written down after spending time with his best friend.

“Contradiction is a signal of intelligence.”

Then he explains why. He has always changed his mind. Running a company with hundreds of people makes that inconvenient. His team will remind him that the week before he said something completely different.

His answer? “Well, I evolved.”

There is something almost rebellious about that attitude now. We live in a culture that archives everything. Every opinion can be screenshotted, every contradiction can be presented as evidence that you were wrong, hypocritical, inconsistent, problematic, whatever today's internet has decided the appropriate punishment is…

Bruno doesn't seem particularly interested in living that way.

“I feel more proud to be a walking contradiction sometimes than to be very coherent with things I've said in the past.”

He would rather change his mind than become trapped inside an old version of himself. It also explains something about the relationship between him and Alex.

Bruno describes his relationship with Alex through the language of duality. Alex may be seen as the calm, business-minded one and Bruno as the chaotic creative, but both contain the opposite qualities.

“No one's only that one thing,” he tells me. “We're all duality.”

That is another reason the brand feels so human, it was never built around a perfect identity. It was built by two people who were still figuring theirs out.

Gen Everything

Eventually, and naturally, we get to Gen Z. And Bruno's first reaction is almost perfect.

“Fuck being Gen Z. I'm Gen everything.”

He doesn't particularly believe in dividing people into neat generational categories. He doesn't feel fundamentally different from his father simply because they were born in different decades.

But when we start talking about the stereotype that Gen Z is lazy or unambitious, something more personal comes through. Bruno doesn't claim to speak for an entire generation. In fact, he actively rejects that idea.

“Who the fuck am I? I'm nobody.”

What he can talk about is his own experience. He tells me that he was fortunate enough to find a purpose when he was 18. That purpose changed his life, gave him something to wake up for and made him want to work.

“I work my ass off. I love working.”

For Bruno, ambition isn't really about productivity for productivity's sake. It is about having a reason to get out of bed. He describes waking up every day with a mission. That doesn't mean working twenty-four hours a day. Quite the opposite, he values leisure deeply, but even his leisure has intention behind it.

A Saturday off becomes something to protect. He imagines texting his best friend, going hiking, having breakfast somewhere he loves and then sitting down for three hours doing absolutely nothing.

“Intentional chill.” This might be one of the most revealing phrases in the entire conversation.

Because perhaps what people misunderstand about this generation isn't that they don't want to work hard. The truth is that they are simply less willing to work hard for things they don't believe in.

Bruno is careful not to turn that into a universal statement. His point is simply that comparing generations is complicated when the worlds they inhabit are completely different. His father didn't grow up with artificial intelligence. We did… The rules changed while everyone was still playing the same game.

The Higher You Go, The More They See Your Ass

Then I ask him the question everyone eventually asks people who become visibly successful: Is it lonely at the top?

He tries to illustrate a triangle, attempting to explain the idea of hierarchy. Naturally, we joke about the Illuminati first… Then Bruno gives me one of the absolute best lines of the conversation.

He tells me something his father once heard from a friend:

“Life is like a monkey climbing up a palm tree. The higher you go, the more they see your ass.”

We all immediately knew we had a title idea, and couldn't contain our laughter.

The joke is funny, but what follows isn't. Bruno admits that the higher you go, the harder it can become to have authentic relationships. There is more jealousy, more projection, more people seeing your life through their own insecurities.

And yet he doesn't consider himself lonely now, and the reason is surprisingly intimate.

For a long time, he says, his entire personality depended on NUDE Project.

“My personality relied on this project for a long time. I didn't have a Bruno.”

There was Bruno from NUDE Project, and there was supposed to be a Bruno who was simply somebody's son, somebody's friend, somebody's partner.

Learning to separate those people, he says, has been part of the work he's done on himself. He compares it to being Spider-Man. There is Bruno with the suit on, and there is Bruno at home.

One version gets invited into extraordinary rooms, travels, meets artists, directors, musicians and finds himself being shown around the Apple offices with some of his favourite creatives.

The other goes to coffee shops with his best friend and talks about life, and he doesn't want to lose either. “I feel like life is a video game,” he tells me.

There is the human part of life, built around friendship, love and simplicity. And then there is the strange, exhilarating, dopamine-heavy side that comes with building something ambitious and watching it become much bigger than yourself.

The trick, perhaps, is not allowing one version to consume the other… This feels particularly important when the thing you built has become an identity in itself.

Because eventually, success can become another form of not belonging. You can become so good at being the person everyone sees that you forget to be the person nobody is watching. Bruno seems to be learning how to avoid that.

Make Amor Great Again

Then we arrive at love, there is no way I could avoid this topic… I ask Bruno about the direction behind the new campaign and why, at a moment when the world feels increasingly divided, NUDE would choose to put love at the centre of the conversation.

He stops me to correct the title.

“Make Amor Great Again.”

And he insists that the difference matters.

And then he starts talking about something much bigger than a campaign. He talks about the idea of one love, about spirituality, religion and the simplicity of treating the person next to you as if they belong to you too. He talks about how ridiculous our divisions can look when you zoom out far enough.

Countries.

Race.

Culture.

Gender.

The endless ways humans invent categories and then use them to separate themselves from one another. His conclusion is almost childlike in its simplicity, which is probably why it works. There is something beautiful about travelling somewhere completely different, looking another person in the eye and realising that, underneath all the cultural differences, you are experiencing the same world.

And then he takes the thought one step further. For someone with a distinctly individual point of view, he says, it is still important not to take life too seriously or become obsessed with competition.

“Eventually, we're all one, and the collective win is much more important than an individual win.”

That philosophy explains something about the way he talks about NUDE Project.

He doesn't only want his company to win. He talks about Spain winning, spanish fashion winning, young people winning, different brands creating something meaningful. The collective being more important than the individual.

It is a surprisingly generous philosophy in an industry built around comparison and competition... And maybe it is also the final evolution of the outsider. At first, being different means standing apart. Then you realise being different is what allows you to create something. And eventually, you realise the thing you created was never really supposed to be about you.

The Place They Built

There is an interesting circularity to Bruno's story. He spent his childhood moving between worlds. He learned early what it felt like to say goodbye. He grew up without one uncomplicated answer to the question, “Where are you from?” He returned to places that were supposed to feel like home and sometimes didn't. He wanted to be understood, not necessarily by everyone, but by the people who could see the world in a way that made sense to him.

Then he met Alex.

Two young people who couldn't quite find what they were looking for decided to make it themselves. And people came, first a few, then more, then thousands. The clothes became the entry point, but the deeper thing was always recognition.

You see yourself in something… You put it on… You find someone else wearing it. You realise they understand the joke too; You have found your people.

That is what makes the story of NUDE Project more interesting than a story about a successful fashion company. Because the most important thing Bruno and Alex built may not be the brand at all. It may be the feeling underneath it.

The feeling of walking into a room and not having to explain yourself. The feeling of finding people who understand you, the feeling of finally being somewhere and thinking, I belong here.

They spent years searching for belonging. Then, almost without realising it the outsiders didn't find the place they were looking for. They built it.