I want you to picture two little girls. Sisters, only a year and four months apart. Their names are Thali and Gabi, and they’re growing up in the early 2000s, in Maringá – a small city in the countryside of Southern Brazil.
These girls are fun. They’re creative and quirky, they do pretty much everything together. They don’t have the internet yet, but they love to watch old black and white silent movies. It inspires their fashion sense – even though fashion isn’t really ‘a thing’ where they live.
THALI: “We wanted to dress different from the other people from the city. We had the references and we tried to make our own clothes, by painting them, or going to a thrift shop and buying male pants and then doing like, high-waisted shorts”.
Other people in their little pocket of the world find their outfits very strange.
THALI: “Everyone was kind of like, ‘what are they doing?’ Like, ‘why are you wearing something like this’?”
But not too many years later, that flair would be their livelihood. They would form an internationally renowned art collective known as Two Lost Kids, creating distinctive content for some of the biggest brands in the world. Clients would willingly place full creative control in their hands, wanting the Thali and Gabi magic sprinkled all over their image. Two Lost Kids have turned Adidas and KFC and Doritos and Coca-Cola and Crocs and Levi’s campaigns into works of actual art. They conjure scenes and stories no one else possibly could, then personally bring them to life – whoever it’s for, a Two Lost Kids piece is directed, edited, filmed, sound designed and graphically designed by these two lost kids themselves. In an age of social media influencers, they stand out as something else – true content creators, with their own unique lens on the world.
In hindsight, that trajectory seems virtually predestined. The girls’ shared, strong sense of style and love of performance was nurtured and encouraged at home: Dad was Japanese, an eye doctor who liked to film home movies on the huge VHS camcorder he’d brought home from a trip to Japan.
GABI: “He was the first ‘vlogger’ we ever met, because he would literally just put it on a tripod and record us doing regular life stuff.”
The girls would dress up to perform TV soap operas and dances and “fashion runways” for the camera.
GABI: “I think the fashion runways were the funniest ones because we're kids and we wanted to show off our clothes and copy the models we see on TV... it was very cute.”
Mum was a geography teacher who loved arts and crafts and home decoration. Grandma loved to draw; Grandpa loved handmaking things like baskets out of bamboo in the traditional rural style. Visual expression and a compulsion to create was second nature in this family. Even though their parents initially hoped Thali would go into medicine and Gabi would find a more traditional job, they soon came to accept the pair would be finding a way to make something out of their endless creations.
THALI: “In the beginning, it was really hard to make our parents understand that it could be something interesting... Even we were really afraid that we wouldn’t make money. It was hard... Our profession didn’t exist. Especially coming from a small city, everything seemed even further away. We thought, ‘okay, we want to do this but how are we going to get people to notice us?’”
Eventually, the internet entered their lives – a portal to anyone and everyone, a place to publish their wild bright visions – and Two Lost Kids was born.
THALI: “We started as a blog because it was the time of the blog. It was about travel and about fashion.”
