Fashion was my first language. Long before I found words, I spoke through fabrics, colors, and the way I pieced them together. It was my earliest form of creative expression, so much so that I found myself at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC for college. When I arrived, I realized I was different. I wasn’t the kid who had memorized fashion magazines at age seven or could name every designer in Paris. I was simply a girl who loved to dress herself like a mood board, who wore joy in bright colors, curiosity in bold textures, and possibility in playful silhouettes.
My First Love
The Renaissance Shoot
This shoot will always have my heart. The location alone felt like it was whispering ideas to me, and from that spark bloomed the vision: a Renaissance theme, reimagined through my eyes. I’ve always been enamored with that era, the opulence, the romance and I wondered, what would a Black queen in her dressing room look like in this world ? In these photos, I don’t feel like I’m looking at myself at all. I see a living painting, a piece of art that just happened to be wearing my skin.
Becoming my own Muse
Every true creative knows- no masterpiece comes together alone. For this one, I became the muse of artist Beonica Dunn. She took a curtain, of all things, and with her hands and vision, transformed it into a dress. She pinned and draped until the ordinary became unforgettable. And when I wore it, I knew this was iconic.
This piece is the marker, the first step into my nomadic journey. The summer of ’24. The summer I began my liberation, my truest path toward freedom. Just a year before, I was sitting in an empty apartment in Van Nuys, California, in the darkest and most transformative season of my life. I had been ready to run away to Mexico and start over. It didn’t work then. But a year later, life brought me there anyway, not as an escape, but as a homecoming. I lay in a pink clay pool surrounded by white stones, breathing air that tasted like new beginnings. And here’s the truth: freedom isn’t free. It cost me everything I thought I needed.