Academia: A Life of Learning
September has always felt a little like January’s more interesting sister to us. January arrives carrying all that pressure of new resolutions, new habits and a somehow improved version of ourselves, while September feels gentler and, in a way, more familiar: summer has scattered us a little, the mornings become cooler, routines return, and suddenly there is that old feeling of opening a fresh notebook and wanting to gather our thoughts again.
We probably carry it from our school years. The smell of books, untouched pages, sharpened pencils, the seriousness with which we once chose a new pen, and that peculiar excitement of having an entire year ahead without knowing quite what it would bring. Even when nobody is waiting for us in a classroom anymore, September seems to remind us that life can have chapters, and that from time to time it is good to sit down, look at the one we are living now and ask ourselves a few questions.
Where are we going? What are we giving most of our attention to? What have we been postponing? Are we sleeping enough, moving enough, seeing the people we love enough? Is work quietly eating the rest of life again? What would we still like to learn? What would we like to finish, and what would we actually be quite relieved to stop doing altogether?
Very ordinary questions, really, but ordinary questions have a funny way of stopping us from living six months on autopilot.
And this is how our little Academia Edit began to take shape.
An Idea from Behind the Screen
The idea for our newest little creation didn’t actually come from the design table. It came from Ugnė, our Head of E-commerce, who spends most of her working days behind a screen making sure the Son de Flor online world works as it should, and who one day suggested that we make a Son de Flor daily planner.
We liked the idea immediately, but as often happens here, once an idea enters the room, everyone starts adding a little something to it. So the planner slowly became more than a place for appointments and those eternal to-do lists that somehow seem to reproduce overnight no matter how enthusiastically we cross things off.
One detail we particularly love is that there are no dates inside. You can begin in September, forget about it for three weeks, come back in October, disappear again during a particularly chaotic December and pick it up in January without a single guilty blank page staring back at you. We didn’t want another planner telling you that you had somehow failed at planning. Life doesn’t always happen according to neatly numbered pages, so this one simply waits for you.
There is space to organise the practical parts of life, but we also wanted to leave space for the person doing all that organising, so throughout its pages we added questions about wellbeing, goals, balance and the direction in which life is moving, little reminders to stop and check in with yourself, thoughts and quotes for the day, and photographs from our Fall & Winter 2026 collection. Not a tool for organising yourself into perfection, because we are not particularly interested in perfection, but a small companion to return to whenever you need to gather yourself again.
We made only 100 of them, and for the covers we went back to the linen already living in our studio and used leftover fabrics from our production. We have always loved finding another purpose for beautiful pieces of linen that are too small to become a dress or a skirt, yet far too precious to be treated as waste, and wrapping something meant for writing, thinking and keeping in fabric that already carries a little piece of Son de Flor history felt exactly right.
When the Head of E-commerce Becomes the Model
And then we needed photographs.
Normally, this would mean finding someone to model the planner and our linen clothes around it, but this time the woman who had imagined the project was already sitting right there in the office, so at some point we all looked at Ugnė, and Ugnė, quite correctly, understood what was coming next!
Being photographed is definitely not part of her job description, nor was it particularly inside her comfort zone. As our Head of E-commerce, she is usually on the other side of what you see - working with products, numbers, website pages, customer journeys and all those little invisible things that have to happen for an online shop to feel simple when you visit it.
This time we nudged her gently to the other side.
She put on the clothes, took the planner she had helped create, stood in front of the camera, felt awkward for a little while, then less awkward, and eventually found herself actually enjoying the experience. And we hope she learned something new about herself too, because this is something we would really like Son de Flor to remain as we grow: not only a company where everyone becomes very good at the one thing written beside their name on an organisational chart, but a place where ideas are allowed to travel between people and departments, and where we occasionally encourage one another to try something we would never have volunteered for ourselves.
Frida Dress in Twilight Tartan
An e-commerce person can have a product idea. Someone from production can see something in a photograph that the creative team didn’t notice. A woman who has spent years behind a computer can suddenly find herself in front of a camera. Work occupies such an enormous part of our lives that it would be a little sad if the only thing it taught us was how to become better at work.
And, when we thought about it, Ugnė’s little journey from behind the screen to in front of the camera turned out to be a rather good explanation of what Academia means to us in the first place.
To Remain Teachable
Academia can easily become an aesthetic - tartan skirts, old books, university corridors, spectacles, leather bags, beautiful libraries and cups of coffee beside pages filled with notes - and we certainly enjoy all of that. Our Indian Ink, Wild Plum and Twilight Tartan, together with the Edith Trousers, Jane Vest, Enola Dress, Frida Dress and Classic Skirts, seem to have been waiting rather patiently for September to arrive so they could belong to precisely this world.
But underneath the aesthetic sits something much more interesting to us: curiosity, and the willingness to remain teachable throughout an entire life.
To be able to say I don’t know without feeling smaller for it, and then to go and find out. To read something that challenges an opinion we have carried for twenty years and allow ourselves to change our mind. To learn a language simply because we love the sound of it, study philosophy without needing to turn it into a career, understand our finances at forty, learn to grow tomatoes at sixty, go back to university at seventy, or pick up a pencil and discover at thirty-five that we actually know how to draw.
There is no age at which curiosity becomes inappropriate, and no point at which we are supposed to have finally figured ourselves out.
For women, there is another layer to this story that we don’t want to forget. The sight of a woman sitting in a university library with a book in front of her feels completely ordinary to us today, but historically it is not ordinary at all. Generations of women fought for access to education, universities, professions, libraries and rooms where knowledge was created and decisions were made, and education gave women far more than qualifications: it gave language, independence, economic possibility, choice, and the ability to question what they had been told a woman’s life should be.
There is quite a lot of history inside the simple image of a woman with a book.
Edith Trousers in Twilight Tartan
Today many of us have the enormous privilege of continuing to learn long after formal education ends, and yet adult life has its own clever way of filling every available space. Work, children, parents, relationships, homes, groceries, appointments, emails, school messages, birthdays, laundry and those seventeen small things nobody notices until nobody does them can gradually push curiosity to the very bottom of the list.
And still, we believe a woman needs a life of her own inside her life.
Books she wants to read, questions she hasn’t answered, ideas that belong only to her, places in her mind she hasn’t visited yet, and things she is still becoming. Not because everything we learn has to make us more productive, successful or useful, but because curiosity itself keeps something alive in us.
Our September Academia
So this month we are playing with Academia in both senses.
There is the wardrobe, of course: deep Indian Ink, beautiful Wild Plum, the old-school feeling of Twilight Tartan, linen trousers and vests, long linen skirts and dresses that seem perfectly at home among bookshelves, wooden desks, university corridors, museums, cafés and long autumn walks taken while still thinking about something we have just read.
A little serious, a little romantic, a little old-fashioned - which, by now, we know is often exactly where Son de Flor feels most at home.
And then there is the other Academia, the one we are much more interested in keeping for life: writing things down, asking questions, paying attention, changing our minds, trying something we are not immediately good at, allowing ourselves to be beginners again and occasionally stepping outside the role we have become comfortable playing.
This is also why our little planner feels quite personal to us. Yes, it will hold appointments, goals and lists of things that need to be done, but between all those practical things we wanted to leave a little room for the one person who can very easily disappear somewhere between them all: you.
So these 100 linen-covered planners are our small September reminder to keep a notebook nearby, keep asking questions and keep some empty pages in life for things we don’t know yet. There is no date telling you when to begin, no little punishment for stopping, and no rule saying you cannot begin again.
Because learning, just like life, rarely happens in a perfectly straight line.
Ugnė has already started. 🤍
