Dressing for the Dream with Gabi Maretti

For Gabi Maretti, fashion was the vehicle that helped carry her from a childhood shaped by instability to a life she once only dared to speak out loud. Today, as the founder of Moda de Poder, an image consulting brand serving clients across New York and Brazil, Gabi has built something far bigger than a styling business. She’s built a practice rooted in psychology, design, and above all, kindness.

“Fashion is beyond looking good,” Gabi says. “It’s a superpower that I learned to use to achieve my dreams.”

From Brazil to NYC: A 17-Year Dream

Gabi moved to New York three years ago, but the dream itself is nearly two decades old. It took 17 years from the moment she first said it out loud — I want to live in New York — to actually getting there. Fashion, she says, was one of the tools that got her across the finish line.

“I always dressed for what I wanted to become, not for what I was currently in,” she explains. It’s a philosophy that now sits at the center of her work with clients: fashion not as performance, but as a quiet form of self-authorship. “It’s a way to be able to be the main character in your own movie.”

That instinct didn’t come from an easy upbringing. Gabi was raised by a single mother, without a functional family structure, and with very little contact with her father. The complexity of that early life, she says, is exactly what shaped the values she leads with today — an openness to diversity, a refusal to judge people for where they come from, and a deep commitment to kindness as a way of moving through the world.

What People Don’t See

Behind the image of a woman thriving in New York City is a story most people never hear.

“People see my life here and don’t think about all the harassment, judgments I get,” Gabi shares. “But I continue because I believe I can do more, I can impact people positively.”

Her mother’s sacrifices sit at the heart of that resolve. “I saw how she had to give up her own dreams to allow me to live mine,” Gabi says.
It’s part of why she’s worked hard  emotionally and spiritually — to be able to handle everything that comes with building a life and a business far from home.

When asked about what most people misunderstand about her industry, she explains, “The industry of image consulting is perceived as a vanity.” she says. “The work that I do is not about making people dress better, but it’s a mix between psychology, design and fashion, that is about making the other person feeling seen.”

“It’s not about spending thousands of dollars on clothes”, she adds. It’s about buying if needed and with a purpose. It’s something she teaches every client: the difference between fashion and style.

“If you have style, you don’t have to follow the season’s trends.”

Gabi was recently invited to join a panel at the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce to speak on secondhand fashion and the power of image consulting. She counts this milestone among her proudest moments so far.

Moda de Poder runs primarily as a one-woman operation, with Gabi bringing in a team as workshops or client needs require. But running solo, she’s learned, isn’t the same as doing it all alone.

“Thinking that I can do everything by myself — it’s an illusion,” she admits, naming it as one of her earliest and most important lessons. “We have to know the parts we need help with, and be able to ask for help in areas we can’t do ourselves.”

That’s especially true given that Moda de Poder isn’t Gabi’s only job. She balances the business alongside a full-time career as a marketing executive at a multinational company.Plus, as she puts it, “a whole life.” What keeps her going is discipline: starting each day doing something for herself before giving her time to anyone else. And beneath that discipline is a deeper motivation — knowing the brand genuinely changes how people feel.

“I got surprised by how the work of Moda de Poder has an impact on people’s lives. People tell me that they feel seen, they don’t feel invisible anymore. That’s the most powerful thing I could hear.”

Living in the U.S. has given Gabi a phrase she now leans on often: “not my circus, not my monkeys”. It’s become shorthand for one of the biggest things she’s had to unlearn which was the need for control.

“Focus on the parts that you can control, or build something that you can control,” she says. “That’s how you build something that is meaningful for yourself and for others.”

As for what she hopes to leave behind for the next generation of women, Gabi points to one word: community. “I grew a lot surrounding myself with people that could inspire me somehow,” she says. “I genuinely feel that through the power of community, we can become better and stronger.”

Her inspiration, fittingly, doesn’t come from one place. “I’m very observant of people that surround me, in different ways. From my doorman to a CEO of a multinational company,” she says. “Inspiration can come from so many different things and people.”

Lately, Gabi has taken to asking the people around her a simple question: What’s your big dream?

What she’s found is that many people have never really thought about it. “We often keep living in survival mode, living someone else’s dream, and don’t really listen to our own,” she says. “I like provoking people to think about their dreams — that they can achieve it.”

It’s advice she extends to any woman considering her own entrepreneurial leap: “If you can dream, you can achieve it. It’s about feeling confident and owning your superpower. We all have one.”