‘Welcome to the Gym’ came together fast. I had three weeks, no real plan, and more pressure than clarity. At the time, I was deep in academic stress. Everything around me was about profitability, market appeal, clean outcomes. I kept hearing the word “sellable.” But I had no interest in designing for a buyer. I was not looking to create a financial product. I felt detached from the language of fashion as business and I did not want to pretend otherwise. What I needed was to make something without permission.

The conceptual spark came from Fight Club. Not the violence itself, but the unraveling of routine. The way identity corrodes under pressure when you are told to perform functionality inside systems built to exhaust you. I did not enter the season with a pitch. I started sewing, and that act split the work into three natural sections. The garments shaped the story.

The first section was the corporate world. Models were dressed in all black with slick silver-lined makeup and glossy 2000s curls. Clean, cold, calculated. The looks were uniform and polished, created to mirror the illusion of control and corporate aspiration. The visual language was sharp but it carried a deadness beneath it. The stillness before collapse.

Then came the break. The fight club. The palette cracked open into brown, gold, yellow, and red. Everything got louder. Drapes were pulled tighter or dragged off the body completely. Fabric twisted. Shoulders dropped. Some garments clung. Others sagged like something melting. I styled the models to reflect that undoing. Skin flushed, lips split, faces bruised. Not literally injured but visibly undone. Eyeshadow like swelling, mouths like silence after impact. The clothing did not fix them. It exposed the stress. The fight was always metaphor but the aftermath was made flesh.

In the final movement, silver, black, and deep saturated blue took over. The models moved like the skyline. Slow, gleaming, inhuman. Their faces were stripped of warmth and made up in cool-toned grays and chrome sheens. They were no longer bruised but reflective. Sculptural. Cold like the city after collapse. These looks were my most experimental. One gown was torn silver sequin mesh, frayed and sharp like shredded metal. Another was sheer organdy layered beneath satin ribbons, worn with a tailored skirt cut to slice. They shimmered with a kind of violence. They felt quiet but dangerous. The silence after everything falls.

Jewelry throughout the collection deepened the contrast. I created pieces in sharp dichotomy. Some were high fantasy, large crystals arranged in Versailles-era formations, dripping in Marie Antoinette excess, glass-cut precision, and regal coldness. Others were synthetic, even absurd. Rhinestone-covered pull tabs, soda can tops, raw scraps of metal crusted in sparkle. Together they read like luxury and waste fused into one body. Something eternal and something disposable. Equal parts costume and weapon.

The palette follows that emotional progression. From control to combustion to aftermath. From black to red to steel. Draping throughout the collection pushed further into discomfort. Garments were structured to imply fragility. Nothing was soft by accident. Even the easy silhouettes were patterned to hold something back. To tense just beneath the surface.

The show was staged where I made the collection, in the gym at my house. The set was assembled overnight from pre-existing elements recycled from Spring 2024, arranged to resemble a gym; but theatrical, knowingly artificial. A performance space pretending to be something real, while inside something real was happening. It was built to look like a set of a gym inside a gym, that push-pull of staging and sincerity. It was not immersive. It was revealing. And it held the same emotional weight as the clothing.

There was no team. No studio. No timeline. I did it alone. I cut the patterns. I draped. I sewed. I built. Every decision came from instinct. No one edited it. No one filtered it. I was not trying to get attention. I was not trying to sell anything. I was just trying to get through it.

And when it was over, the lights shifted. The final model disappeared into the dark, and “Bittersweet Symphony” began to play. I stood next to the warped set I had reassembled, watching the room settle into stillness. That was the moment I had imagined from the beginning. The buildings gone. The sky finally open.

That is the ending. That is the show.