The Woman in the Mirror
The Woman in the Mirror
On posture, worth, and the small transformation that happens in a fitting room when nobody else is watching.
There is a moment in every fitting that I now watch for.
She puts the piece on. She turns toward the mirror. And before she says anything, before she has even decided whether she likes it, her shoulders go back and her chin comes up about an inch.
She does not know she did it. She would deny it if I described it. But I have seen it enough times now that I have stopped thinking of it as a coincidence.
The piece is not doing what you think
It is easy to assume the garment made her feel better about how she looks. Sometimes that is part of it. But that is not the thing I am watching.
What actually happens is that she receives evidence. Somebody spent weeks on something intended only for her. Somebody asked what she wanted and then went and made it. For a lot of women, that is genuinely unfamiliar. Most of them are the person who does the considering, not the person who gets considered.
The right piece does not change who you are. It reveals who you already were.
The posture change is what happens when a woman is briefly, physically reminded that she is worth that much trouble.
Why the butterfly
I use the butterfly quietly throughout the work and people assume it is about becoming something new.
It is not. A butterfly does not turn into a different creature. Everything it becomes was already coded inside the thing it was before. Nothing gets added. It simply arrives at the form it was always going toward.
That is what I believe about the women I work with, and it is why I will never describe a piece as transforming someone. You do not need transforming. You need the wrapping taken off.
What she says afterward
The reaction I hear most often is not about beauty. It is some version of, I forgot I could feel like this.
Forgot. Not discovered. She is not meeting a new woman in the mirror. She is running into one she has not seen in a while, because life got busy and practical and she stopped dressing for herself somewhere around the time everything else became more urgent.
If a piece of silk can shorten the distance back to that woman, then the weeks of work were worth it. That is the entire reason I still do this by hand.
Every piece begins with a conversation about you, not about clothing.
B O O K A P R I V A T E C O N S U L T A T I O N
Designed to make you feel.
