365 Dreams: Diary from the Edge of Madness
Week 1: The Birth of Vanished Gallery

365 Dreams: Diary from the Edge of Madness
Week 1: The Birth of Vanished Gallery

It begins, as all great disasters do, with a familiar feeling of fear and an echoing, softly screaming voice that asks: Am I out of my mind, or is everyone else? After years of being trapped in the neo-lit, grey and white gulag of a corporate marketing department - a hellish world of kpi's, PowerPoint slides and annoying lunch dates - I finally snapped. The great merciless machine with its incessant grinding of mediocrity and opportunism was eating me up. I had to break free from the chains of micromanagement and constantly recurring team events. So I did what any sane madman would do: I walked out the door, burned all my bridges and never looked back.

This is Vanished Gallery. Not a brand. Not a project. A starving anti-brand. It’s a violent rejection of everything I learned in those lifeless rooms filled with dead-eyed "innovators." You know the ones—their ideas taste like stale bread, their creativity choked by deadlines and "market research." They called it strategy. I called it slow death.

But I'm not here to pursue a strategy or a plan, and I'm not here to build another bland clothing company vomiting out lifeless slogans and fast-fashion garbage on a soulless socialmedia account. No, Vanished Gallery is the offspring of naive creativity and black humor, a line of t-shirts and hoodies that are just as worn-out and battered as the souls of the people wearing them. Each piece is the perfect imperfection: torn, disfigured, unapologetic - just like this column and, probably, just like me.

This is not just about T-shirts. It's about something deeper and more original. A test. An acid-soaked interrogation of the voices in my head that kept whispering to me: “Get out of here before you become one of them and trade your dreams for corporate benefits.“ For years, I convinced myself that the problem was them—the system, the clueless product managers, the creatively bankrupt campaigns. But now the spotlight’s on me. Was it all just arrogance? Was I simply another self-important twit who thought he had it all figured out?

Only time will tell. What I know for sure is this: sitting back and doing nothing was killing me faster than the risk of failing ever could. So here I am, armed with nothing but a warped sense of humor, a pile of torn-up t-shirts, and the determination to prove that something real can still come out of all this madness.

The premise of this insanity is simple. "365 Dreams" is a public diary of failure—a grand experiment in seeing how far one misguided, hopeful fool can go in a year. There are going to be fifty-two chapters of raw, unfiltered updates about my progress, my faceplants, and the occasional “holy hell, that actually worked” moment. Think of it as a weekly creative autopsy in real time. Each tuesday, I’ll pull apart the guts of this operation and show you what’s inside. No buzzwords, I promise: no buzzwords. Just me, a driven maniac, chasing a dream with a flamethrower in one hand and a screen-printing machine in the other.

So, buckle up. This column will not be a feel-good Hallmark tale of dreams coming true. No, I think it’s going to be unpredictable and maybe even a little deranged. There will be mayhem. There will be missteps. And there will be t-shirts with holes burned into them that somehow, inexplicably, sell.

Welcome to Vanished Gallery. This is the diary of a lunatic. Let’s see how far we can push this thing before it all comes crashing down.

See ya next week