Helena van Essen lives and works as a visual artist and designer of, among other things, funerary monuments in Amsterdam. She developed the parlAmore mourning knot, because events in her immediate environment made her realize that nowadays nothing shows that someone is mourning.
“That thought inspired me to come up with a contemporary mourning sign that, unlike the well-known mourning band, should be personal and universal. But how? At one point I looked at just a button on just any shirt and as if in a flash I suddenly saw: a button, I have to use that.