Every issue, GRAZIA USA highlights 17 Game Changers, who inspire, educate, and celebrate individuality, beauty, and style. Meet JJ Martin an American in Milan who is using wellness to spread hope worldwide through her lifestyle brand La Double J.
Originally from Los Angeles, I’ve lived in Milan for 20 years now. Moving here, I was originally drawn to the craft and dedication of Italians. In my first 15 years here, I was a journalist: first the European editor for Harper’s BAZAAR for five years, and then I was on staff at WSJ. Magazine and then at Wallpaper for eight years. I wrote about all these exceptional creative people in Italy while on the side madly obsessed with vintage, gathering an enormous collection of vintage clothing and jewelry. As a side hobby project, I launched a website called La Double J, which was basically an online magazine where I not only sold the vintage pieces I curated, but I was showing it and all the creative women behind it in a super editorial way. I would feature everything from the incredible women’s designs to how they decorated their homes, lay their tables, and organized their closets to how they were just super chic, and that was the start of Double J in 2015.
A year and a half later, I started making this one dress from vintage prints — slowly, like really slowly — which has since exploded into an entire company as it’s known today. We have grown into doing ski wear, beachwear, evening wear and have merged into lifestyle with tabletops and porcelain plates made in Verona and glassware in Murano. Everything in the company is made in Italy, typically by historic Italian manufacturers to support Italy for being such a magnificent nation. I appreciate the dedication to excellence of quality they bring to the product, and then I bring the Double J aesthetic with a really zany, fun, joyful color print package.
We’re a big ball of hope at Double J, which doesn’t come easy for anyone. You really have to make a conscious effort to be hopeful. Hope is a compelling energy, all of these emotions that we have represent different vibrations and frequencies and when we dive into a pessimist pool, that’s a low frequency. Hope, however, is a really, really high frequency, like love, that can transform. Hope is a vast, massive ball of optimism that always finds where the light can shine.
Personally, I have a spiritual morning practice that I do without fail, which is really just my reset button. No matter what happens in my own body, in my mind, in my own home, in my own office, or the world, it all gets washed away and soaked and scrubbed off every morning. I start with a little bit of bodywork and then mantra singing and thinking about the future. I’ve found that the quietness of yoga helps so much in coming into the grace of silence and allowing my intuition, wisdom, and resources to come forth to remain hopeful.
Professionally, I try to boost our customers’ hope in everything we do at Double J. We use a lot of color and print, elevating the mood. We wrap all of that up in our messaging conveyed in joy, laughter, happiness, the way we talk to our customers when they come into the store, and how we present our product in visuals. We want everyone to feel included and a part of the brand, and there’s nothing more uplifting than that. To be hopeful on a global scale, I would like to see unity consciousness become a phenomenon.
We have to start realizing that we are one as a human race and get away from individualism. The constant judgment, criticism, and punishment divide us further and take us away from humanity’s natural state, unity. Unity is about consciousness and understanding others — not that you have to agree with others. With unity, we can all have hope for a positive future.
— As told to Ty Gaskins
Pick up GRAZIA USA’s March 2022 issue on newsstands and email [email protected] to subscribe.
