This collection was never meant to be static.
Cosmic Bodies began as a question: what if clothing matched the personality of the planet it was named for? Not by looking like space, but by feeling like it — Saturn’s restraint, Neptune’s depth, Jupiter’s expansiveness. Eight looks. Eight energies. Each one is designed to be moved in, not just looked at.
Before the runway, the collection went somewhere else first. And that choice changed everything.
The Dance Floor
Rapid Rhythms is a Lindy Hop and swing community in Grand Rapids where engineers, artists, teachers, and dancers share the same floor every Monday night. I brought the Cosmic Bodies collection there because dancers know something models don’t always get the chance to know: how a garment wants to move.
People wandered through the pieces and chose their own planet. No assigned roles, no hierarchy. Just intuition. They watched each other. Borrowed ideas. Took risks. Softened. Expanded.
There’s a sociological term for what happened next: collective effervescence — the electric feeling that arises when individuals come together in shared presence and play. You could feel it in the room. People stood taller. Smiled wider. Fashion became something else entirely.
Bodies weren’t being evaluated that night. They were being celebrated.
Watching the collection in motion on a dance floor, I learned something that didn’t fully register until the runway: these clothes are not complete until they are moved in.
The Runway
Michigan Fashion Fest × NYFW Edition was held at StudioCOR3 alongside 13 other designers. The same collection. Different context. The energy in the room was different — more structured, more spectatorial — and the clothes responded to that too.
What the runway revealed was how much the collection had grown. From the first spontaneous dance floor evening to a curated runway presentation, the garments had been worn, loved, altered, and understood. Each model brought their own gravity and emotional tone to their planetary look.
And the people in the audience mattered too. My mom Diane, my niece Ophelia, and dear friends Nora and Nicole were in their own colors — dressed in shades that inspire joy, ready to move with me before, during, and after the show. These are the people who help me keep creating. Joy grows in relationship. Color is brighter when it’s shared.
What I Carry Forward
The runway is one way clothes can be seen. The dance floor reminds us how they can be felt.
Every human body is a cosmos — holding its own gravity, its own rhythm, its own orbit. When we allow ourselves to be seen not as perfected objects but as living, moving beings, something opens.
That’s what Cosmic Bodies is for. Not to perform a look. To inhabit one.
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