There is a quiet ritual in returning to an artwork a year after year-be a painting, a fashion monograph, or shadowy photograph once captured in a fleeting second. What once stunned me with surface beauty begins to find deeper things with time. These work don't fade. They gather. They become layered - like fabric worn in the elbows, softer, richer, more personal.
The artists I return to, Alexander McQueen, Collette Dinnigan, Yves Saint Laurent, etc, never really leave. The work isn't just historical or trendy, it resists the very idea of expiration. These aren't seasonal moments, they are iterative legacies. The garments, sketches, philosophies, continue to reveal themselves in fragments - as I change, as the world does.
This is the infinite life of art: it doesn't age, it ages with you. And in that shared timeline, you co-author its meaning. You respond differently at 22 then at 39. The heartbreak you hadn't yet lived, the maternal instinct that hadn't yet woken up in you - these become lenses through which old works revealed new truths.
In this sense, art isn't a frozen object. It's alive. Adapts. It waits patiently for the viewer to catch up. It's a muse that ages with you-not losing relevance but gaining residence. And that's why I keep these monographs close, like sacred texts. Because art, to me, is not just influence. It is an ongoing conversation.
As I return to fashion now, as both mother and woman, with years of life behind me, I look back at my ginormous body of work I created when I was just starting out, I was so young then, a teen eager and electric with endless fuel. I stitched from instinct. I poured my whole self into every dress every draped bodice every tiny glass bead.
For years I saw those boxes and boxes of old designs and samples as clutter - fossils of a life I hadn't lived up to.
But now, I see them as sacred relics of a becoming
Through the lens of time and experience, I can read the emotional fingerprints I left behind. My enthusiasm, my hunger, my romanticism - it's all there, sewn into seams. I can trace my story not just through my sketchbook, but through bias cuts and embroidery. Every unfinished piece has a reason it stopped. Every finished garment holds something I survived...