I come from, what I call, a big 'medical family'.
My father is a pediatrician, stepmother is a dental hygienist, stepfather a occupational medicine doctor, half-sister a physiotherapist, oldest brother a radiologist, my aunt a nurse, an uncle a dentist and my stepsister a psychologist.
Did I forget someone?
Oh and Ines began her career as a nurse...
As some of you already know Ines suffered and died from long-term auto-immune disorders.
(Or was it the overload of MM's..)
The reason there are not many pictures of her is that she felt really insecure about the way she began to look when getting older.
She wanted nobody to know her age.
It was too confronting for her.
I guess it suited her well that her husband, my stepfather, also had and still has a clinic for cosmetic procedures.
He started this for fun, as a hobby, next to his daily job.
Maybe Ines persuaded or at least influenced him to do it, who knows..
When medication also started to affect her appearance she didn't go out any more.
And at some point she could also not walk more than a few steps caused by severe shortness of breath.
She always said about her situation, freely translated from Dutch:
"Things run like how they are supposed to walk."
I find that very funny from her..
Ines grew up in a posh environment where wearing leather gloves was of utmost importance.
And it was not because of her background that she started to design gloves, she rediscovered them out of necessity.
One of the first signs of her disease was that the skin on her hands got easily bruised.
She needed to protect her hands and make them presentable again.
She thought:
"What I need is a second skin.”
It was the start of a quest, resulting in the crown jewel of long leather gloves.
Greetings from sunny and windy but cosy Amsterdam,
Bob, owner and son of Ines