I love this question. Our boogie would heavily feature music that sounds like bubblegum - like Hannah Diamond, Kim Petras, Vendredi sur Mer, Sean Nicholas Savage, or yeule mixed with our studio soundtrack of sparkly sad girl music like Lael Neale, Jenny Hval, Phoebe Bridgers, Broadcast, and Sky Ferreira. Realistically, when I am sketching I have a hard time listening to music and just put on true crime podcasts for hours, but that would make for a very morbid boogie.

This season was heavily influenced by moss covered forests, orchid sanctuaries, the fake flowers in the flower district and the faded tones of old hand done animated movies like Alice in Wonderland and Bambi. I recently got a book called A Dictionary of Color Combinations by Haishoku Soukan I think is about to change my life…

My friends more than anything. A good bad joke. Cartoons and great wine and appetisers. Big fields of flowers and the shape of a star on anything.

Beyond the obvious similarities inherent to globalised cities, I actually find them to be incredibly different in the best way. New York is quite grey in terms of its architecture and the popular style of dress, whereas the streets and markets in Delhi and Noida (where I spend the bulk of my time while in India) are absolutely bursting with print, texture and scent and the general aesthetic of dress is much more colourful and traditional. A lot of the buildings are still similarly concrete at their core, but the signage, food, products and mass amount of people in brightly coloured clothes allow the city to feel infinitely more vibrant. I find when I’m there, I am already at the end of the design process and am looking to fill specific needs in terms of fabric etc. so I mostly just get to enjoy my surroundings and soak everything in.

I try to imagine what cartoon characters would wear in my most ideal versions of their costumes. I actually just watched the movie Belle and in one scene she wears a dress that is a glittering pink rose and I thought to myself maybe we should make that in real life. Similarly, she wears a kaleidoscope dress and I had been thinking for so long about making a print that is multiple faces of light reflected like a diamond. I try to make pieces that feel like you’ve stumbled upon them in your dream vintage store.

Yes, definitely. As I wrote above, I felt like there was a bit of a gap for piece that feel one of a kind and special, but are somewhat affordable in the way vintage pieces are. Of course, we are still priced high enough that many people are unable to afford our pieces, but it is important to me that we pay our producers living wages and maintain quality while still trying to make the pieces relatively accessible.

We conceived of our Elsa Dress last Summer and it’s definitely our best-selling piece. It came from the idea of a butterfly garden and the thought that it would be incredible to look as if you were covered in butterflies. I think it’s having a moment due more to nostalgia than anything else. Beyond just that they’re incredibly beautiful and have a mystical, fairy like quality, butterflies are rooted in my mind in a certain 2000s nostalgia and a desire for youth or the simplicity of just accepting that you are drawn to something that obviously beautiful.

We’re in the process right now of flipping everything! We’ve just placed an order for our packaging tissue paper to be fully recyclable etc. so that felt exciting since we could order a big enough quantity where the cost of the packaging rivalled non-sustainable alternatives. I’m hoping we can keep flipping our textiles to recycled fibres as well as we continue to grow and maintain the same price point.

Botanical gardens are probably my favourite places on this planet. I recently got to go to the orchid show at the Bronx Botanical garden after two years and it was better than I even remembered it. I’m fascinated in the idea of botanical preservation and rare plants and feel the most inspired in those spaces.

We worked with our branding team at Leslie David studio to conceptualise this idea. I think what I love about it is that it plays with the scale of pieces that are already warping the natural scale of things. For example, our butterfly wing dress is made from magnifying the image of a butterfly and distorting it to fit the shape of a dress pattern, which was then laser-cut out to mimic the wing. To have our model wear that dress on top of an enlarged daisy brought the scale back to what is naturally is. There’s something incredibly surreal and wonderful about the shoot that matches the clothes perfectly, toeing the line between reality, the natural and the deeply unnatural.

My friend, designer Isabella Lalonde of Beepy Bella and I are starting a new brand that we’re hoping to present for SS23. It’s something we’ve been daydreaming about for a long time and it’s finally in motion…