‘Shuttle to PATHOS-2’ is a collection built from the feeling of being slightly out of sync with the world around you. It began the way many of my collections do, in a moment of dissociation. It was during a ride on the L train, one of those endless trips where the tunnel seems to stretch forever. I remember looking across the car and seeing my own reflection in the window, but something about it was wrong. The train was full of people, but I felt like I was watching from somewhere else. My eyes were vacant. I was still, but moving. That third-person sense of detachment, that fracture in awareness, it stayed with me and eventually became the emotional blueprint for the collection.

I turned toward the video game SOMA as a framework. Released in 2015 by Frictional Games, SOMA is a psychological horror experience I have returned to countless times since first playing it in 2018. Its impact on me has been persistent, creeping. I would play it, then watch seven-hour no-commentary playthroughs while I sewed. Sometimes I would loop it three times in a single week. It became background noise, then internal noise. The game’s horror is not driven by monsters. It is driven by the breakdown of identity, the loss of physical autonomy, and the existential panic of being conscious in something artificial. That concept felt close to how I experience the future of fashion and, at times, my place within it.

This collection is a psychological response to that dissonance. As the world moves rapidly into a tech-saturated future, I often feel pulled in the opposite direction. While the industry races to digitize bodies and erase the tactile from design, I continue to rely on hand-done construction. I work through draping, pinning, and paper patterns. I cut and sew every prototype myself. My practice is grounded in discipline and detail, in the architectural approach seen in the early couture of Givenchy. The clarity of his lines and the obsessive structure within his gowns are points of reference not because of nostalgia, but because of the patience and permanence they demand. I believe in physical memory. In garments that are shaped by hands and worn by bodies that change.

As a result, this collection holds tension from the first look to the last. It opens with uniforms of cool, clinical restraint. Steel greys dominate. Crackling beadwork, applied in irregular oval patterns, suggests the flicker of failing LED lights. Closures are subtle but imprecise, always slightly off-center. The silhouettes appear functional but feel emotionally vacant. This is clothing that performs containment. It is meant to feel like it belongs inside a sealed underwater facility, where everything is sterilized but something is deeply wrong.

Color enters slowly. Toxic green tones and dense oceanic blue begin to emerge through wet velvets, glossy synthetic knits, and warped nylons. The palette is no longer just sterile. It becomes contaminated. These materials were chosen very intentionally. They mimic weight and texture but are fundamentally false. Synthetic knits and plasticky jerseys imitate something durable, yet exist in mass quantities precisely because they are cheap and easy to forget. They are our system’s version of permanence; artificial longevity in a world obsessed with speed. These garments are built to look like they would last forever, but they are made from what we throw away. That contradiction sits at the heart of the collection.

The final arc brings us into Site Alpha, the home of the WAU, an artificial intelligence keeping corpses alive under the illusion of humanity. The clothes now glitch. WAU-inspired elements wrap and restrict the garments. Black prosthetic-like structures mimic support where none is needed. These are garments caught in a cycle of preservation and mutation. The figure inside no longer seems fully human.

Patternmaking in this collection was about building memory into shape. I reworked basic blocks to simulate mechanical construction. The bust lines split into T-shapes that recall internal garment structures. Many dresses and tops are patterned in quarters, giving the illusion that they were assembled like parts rather than tailored traditionally. I wanted the clothes to feel wrong in the right way. To suggest that someone had tried to reconstruct a person but no longer remembered the original body.

The set was staged at Vila Natalia, my family home in the Bronx, and specifically constructed inside the dining room. The space was altered completely to support the narrative of the collection. Artificial façade walls were built to obscure every existing architectural detail. Large windows were covered entirely, built-in bookcases disappeared behind painted structures, and the archway that separates the dining room from the rest of the house was concealed to frame a clean visual entry point. It created a corridor for the models to emerge from, like a stage behind a screen. What had once been a domestic space was rewritten as a cold, pristine holding environment. Every inch of the room was treated and decorated by hand. The walls were sanded, primed, and painted, the floor was cleared of its usual furniture, and custom props and accents were built to feel both intimate and unsettlingly generic.

Shuttle to PATHOS-2 is not a sci-fi fantasy. It is a visual journal of obsession and psychological exhaustion. It is about the emotional cost of trying to preserve the handmade in a future that is increasingly disposable. It is about the feeling of sewing something real while watching the world replace bodies with images. It is about identity trapped in repetition, memory built from fragments, and garments that try to carry all of it at once.

Campaign shot by Yitzhak Rosenberg