For over two decades, Mara Hoffman led her namesake fashion brand, known for intentional design and a deep commitment to sustainability. In 2024, she closed that chapter and returned to the practices that have always been at her core: creating art through photography, design, art direction, and creative guidance. Her work moves between image-making, consulting, and collaborative art and design projects that help bring vision into form. Here she speaks with Human Shift Editor in Chief Stina Daag about what work means as an artist and how personal evolution shaped her craft. @marahoffman
Stina: So we’re starting this conversation at the crown because this is the Seventh Chakra issue. From Mara Hoffman, the designer, you’ve made a radical and poetic shift. Maybe it’s a reframing of the concept of success, or the concept of endings and beginnings. The word transformation comes to mind.
Mara: I think that’s a beautiful word, but the first word that comes to mind for me is gratitude. Every day I just feel so overwhelmed with gratitude that I’m living this exact life and that I’ve been able to recognize that even in the struggle or the immense discomfort of experiences that led me to this moment, past Mara was always looking out for future Mara, always. And things that felt like, “Oh my God, what is this? This is so hard.” And in these beautiful, mysterious ways, it was all a setup to land me right here.
Running the brand was like going to school to learn how to be in the contrasts of it, how to be in relationship to my creativity, my artistry, my relationship to people and care for people and running teams and my ego and my expression. It was 24 years of the most incredible education that landed me in this position, which would’ve been impossible without trust, without even knowing through every contraction, you got to trust this Mara, lead me to right now being like, “Holy shit, that is everything is the trust game.” I know that’s broad.
Stina: It’s beautiful. And when do you think you understood that trust was the lesson?
Mara: I didn’t start with the awareness that I have now, it’s been a progressive learning from 22 or 23 to now, I’m going to be 49 in March. And what a difference between starting something in your early twenties—that mentality informed every part of it, from the way that I created, to the way that I responded to the world artistically, what I put into the world
