Episode 21: Ownership Through Process (with Helena Eisenhart)

Episode 21: Ownership Through Process (with Helena Eisenhart)

Editor’s Note: This essay is a continuation of the conversation I recently had with Helena Eisenhart [https://www.instagram.com/helenaeisenhart/] on the Showroom Theory Podcast. During our conversation, we spoke about sustainability, deadstock fabrics, inherited wedding dresses, and the growing appetite for custom bridal. But underneath all of those topics was a larger question that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: What happens when a wedding dress already has a past? This essay is an attempt to answer it. The Myth of the Blank Slate I first encountered Helena Eisenhart [https://www.helenaeisenhart.com/]’s work through two custom bridal projects that didn’t look like much else moving through the bridal ecosystem at the time. One for jeweler Lucy Kilgore [https://www.vogue.com.au/brides/weddings/lucy-kilgore-tom-moore-wedding/image-gallery/63f706fac25ae4e94bd97cce2857527c] and another for designer Basie Minus [https://www.instagram.com/p/DWwx2gzmMoG/?img_index=1]. Both felt personal in a way that was difficult to distill into the usual language of bridal. They weren’t simply “nontraditional,” which has become its own kind of aesthetic shorthand. They weren’t trying to shock, reject, or distance themselves from bridal altogether. They felt bridal, but they also felt lived-in, specific, and strangely difficult to place in time. There was a sense of history to each look, but not the nostalgia that often accompanies vintage-inspired dresses. There was romance, sure, but not the fantasy of bodice-ripping book covers. And there was transformation, but not erasure. So much of the bridal industry has been built around the idea that a wedding dress represents a clean beginning. The dress is often treated as an object of arrival, a garment that marks the moment someone crosses from one identity into another. Therefore, it’s supposed to be new, untouched, pristine, and complete. It’s supposed to be the most obvious signifier of “bride.” But Helena’s work seems to begin from another premise entirely: What if the dress doesn’t have to begin with you? What if the garment already carries a life before it reaches your body? What if becoming a bride is not about stepping into a fixed identity, but about bringing everything you already are into sharper focus? Several weeks ago, I chatted with Helena to discuss their emerging custom bridal business, and these were the questions that stayed with me. Helena didn’t set out to become a bridal designer. Nor did they set out to become a sustainable designer, at least not in the branded, strategic sense that word now tends to carry. After graduating from Pratt Institute, they began making clothes the way many independent designers begin making clothes: through instinct, resourcefulness, and proximity. They made custom projects, clothing for friends, and eventually collections that took shape from the materials around them. Before sustainability became a cleanly packaged value proposition, their practice was already rooted in working with what existed. “I didn’t start out saying I’m going to be a sustainable designer,” Helena told me. “I think that’s just the way I grew up, cutting things apart, making things, kind of more DIY.” That origin is vital because it gives their work a different kind of integrity. Sustainability isn’t an aesthetic wrapper placed over the brand after the fact. It’s embedded in the way Helena thinks, sources, cuts, repairs, reconstructs, and imagines. Their work with vintage and deadstock materials doesn’t feel like a concept. It feels more like a habit of seeing. And bridal entered the picture just as organically. Their first wedding dress, Helena recalled, was likely made ten years ago for a close friend getting married at City Hall. It was a red sequined dress, made for a Chinese bride, and while it didn’t announce the beginning of a formal bridal business, it revealed something about the way their work has always moved: through relationships, through requests, through the strange and beautiful momentum of people asking for the thing they can’t quite find elsewhere. “It [bridal] was always part of your brand without being this really preconceived idea to go start a bridal diffusion,” I suggested. They replied, “It’s so funny because I think always the most popular parts of my work are things that are almost like an accident.” I love that, because it resists the overdetermined nature of fashion now, where everything is expected to arrive fully named, fully positioned, fully explained, and fully optimized for circulation. Helena’s bridal work didn’t emerge because they identified a gap in the market. It emerged because someone remembered how a garment made them feel. Lucy Kilgore [https://www.instagram.com/l_u_c__y___/], for instance, first encountered one of Helena’s upcycled wedding dresses during the pandemic. Helena had been working from a home studio on a collection made from local thrift finds, eBay discoveries, scrap fabrics, and even old couch covers. One of the looks was a wedding dress that had been upcycled and embroidered, a kind of collection showpiece inspired by the tradition of 1990s and couture runway shows ending with a bridal look. Lucy saw it, tried it on, and years later, when she was actually getting married, returned to Helena for the real thing. That detail feels like a parable for the future of bridal: The dress didn’t begin as a product. It began as a memory. A Garment Can Accumulate Meaning The more Helena spoke about their process, the more I realized that their work challenges one of bridal’s most persistent assumptions: that value depends on newness. Often in bridal, the dress is treated as a symbolic blank slate. It’s supposed to be new, unworn, and untouched, as though the purity of the garment somehow reinforces the significance of the occasion. While the patriarchal origins of bridal white are another conversation for another episode, it’s safe for us to correlate a wedding with a beginning. It would make sense that the garment must appear to begin there, too. But almost nobody arrives at marriage as a blank slate. We arrive with family histories, private contradictions, inherited rituals, past versions of ourselves, and all the evidence of lives already in motion. We arrive shaped by what came before us. We arrive carrying things. Helena’s work seems to intuitively understand this. When they described Basie’s bridal project, [https://www.instagram.com/p/DWwx2gzmMoG/?img_index=1] which was repurposed from her mother’s wedding dress, Helena mentioned the numerous stains and holes not as unfortunate obstacles, but as evidence of life. “You could tell that her mom had partied in that,” the designer said. “So it was really cool for her to have that previous life carried with her into her own wedding.” That line reframes the entire emotional function of a wedding garment. The dress is not simply a costume for a new role. It’s a vessel. It can hold what happened before, while still making room for what happens next. Helena spoke similarly about another bride, Clarissa [https://www.instagram.com/p/DLiXaHGyXCq/?img_index=1], who came to them with an ivory silk skirt she had found shortly before her wedding. It was beautiful, they told me, but barely intact. “It was completely falling apart,” Helena remembered. “It had probably wine and dirt stains and whatever. I don’t know where the stains came from, but all over it.” Most bridal alteration specialists would see a garment like that as a problem. Too fragile. Too damaged. Too risky. Too far from the ideal of bridal perfection. But Helena saw the possibility of making it wearable without stripping away its character. They reconstructed the waistband, touched up what needed attention, and made a matching top from deadstock silk using a corset pattern they already had. The result wasn’t a traditional restoration; it was a continuation. And that’s the word I keep returning to… Continuation. So much of bridal is organized around the idea of preservation. Preserve the dress. Preserve the photographs. Preserve the fantasy. Preserve the bride at the center of the day as though she exists outside time, untouched by everything that came before and everything that will follow. Helena’s work suggests a different relationship to time. A garment doesn’t become less meaningful because it has been worn. It can become more meaningful because it has been lived in, altered, repaired, and carried forward. “I actually prefer to find things that look really worn,” they told me. “Whether I’m going to collage over it, or with an embroidery, or a print, or something like that, and then leave a little bit of the stain or distressing showing, or just adding on top of it. I really like layering in that way.” There’s an entire philosophy in that sentence. A stain doesn’t always need to disappear.A flaw doesn’t always need to be corrected.A garment can accumulate meaning instead of losing it. The Dress Becomes Yours Through the Process At some point in our conversation, I asked Helena whether working with inherited garments challenges the idea of ownership. If someone brings them a grandmother’s wedding dress, and Helena cuts into it, reshapes it, and transforms it into something new, whose dress is it? Does it still belong to the grandmother?Does it become the bride’s?Or is ownership the wrong framework entirely? “I think it becomes yours through the process,” they said. “It still has the history of the previous owner, but it’s not really theirs anymore. It becomes the next person’s, whoever the next wearer is.” A deceptively simple answer, but it also feels like the center of our entire conversation. Because perhaps the more interesting word isn’t ownership, but stewardship. A wedding dress, especially an inherited one, may not belong to one person in any permanent sense. It moves. It carries one body, then another. It’s altered by time, use, storage, memory, and interpretation. One person wears it as a beginning. Another wears it as an inheritance. Someone else may wear it as a fragment, a bodice, a veil, a lining, a piece of lace sewn into something only they know is there. In that sense, the garment isn’t static. It’s relational. It becomes meaningful through contact. So, Helena’s approach to reconstruction reflects that care. When they works with an existing garment, particularly one with familial or emotional significance, they don’t treat transformation as permission to erase the original language of the piece. “It’s nice to also try to follow similar sewing construction as another way of honoring the garment. If one area was already hemmed by hand, then I’m going to also do that again or continue that. I don’t need to change the entire thing to be so modern.” This is where their work becomes most interesting to me, because it refuses the false binary between old and new. The garment doesn’t have to remain frozen in its original form to be honored. It also doesn’t have to be stripped of its past to feel relevant. The old construction can remain. The handwork can be continued. The stain can become part of the surface. The fabric can be cut into something more revealing, more current, more aligned with the person wearing it now. There’s a tenderness in that kind of alteration. It suggests that reverence doesn’t always mean preservation. Sometimes reverence means knowing what to keep, what to change, and what to carry forward. Not Luxury… Language The more we spoke, the clearer it became that Helena’s custom practice is not simply about offering brides something one-of-a-kind. It’s about creating a process through which identity can be negotiated rather than prescribed. A bride has traditionally entered a salon, tried on a series of gowns, and chosen the one that comes closest to her desired self-image. Luxury has been about selection. And there’s beauty in that process, of course. But there’s also limitation. The available options determine the vocabulary. But custom work changes the grammar entirely. Helena described their process as deeply collaborative, and because most of their bridal work is custom, they spend months with each client, learning not only what they like but what makes them feel most like themselves. The original sketch changes, the references evolve, and the fittings reveal new information. The garment becomes less like an object chosen from elsewhere and more like a conversation taking form. This is one of the reasons I think custom bridal is resonating so strongly now, and one of the reasons I think the bridal industry is about to get turned on its head. Not because everyone wants couture in the old-fashioned sense, and not because every bride is looking for something extravagant, but because more people want to participate in the making of their own image. When I asked Helena what they’re trying to reveal through that process, their answer wasn’t about trends, silhouettes, or even aesthetics. “It’s basically like the best version of yourself,” they said. “You feel the best on your day. Don’t think about traditional bridal at all. Just put that in the back of your mind and think, what do I envision myself looking like as this peak version of myself?” That’s a very different proposition than the one bridal has traditionally offered. And I, for one, am on board. For decades, bridal relied on the language of transformation. Become a bride. Step into the dress. Enter the role. Allow the garment to mark your passage into a new identity. But Helena’s process suggests something closer to revelation. Not becoming someone else, but becoming more legible to yourself.Not performing bridehood, but locating yourself inside it. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Further Reading Altar [https://www.altar-magazine.com/] is an independent publication dedicated to bridal fashion, culture, and ceremony. Through essays, reporting, criticism, and photography, it explores the ideas shaping how we dress, gather, and celebrate. Explore Issue 001 → [https://www.altar-magazine.com/] Photography:Lucy Kilgore by Michelle Pullman [https://www.instagram.com/michellepullman/] and St. Chelle [https://www.instagram.com/st.chelle/]Basie Minus by Jona Christina Photography [https://www.instagram.com/jonachristinaphoto/] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit showroomtheory.substack.com [https://showroomtheory.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Episode 20: It's Not That Deep with Allison Chou (Double Happiness Bridal)

Editor’s Note: This essay accompanies my latest Showroom Theory Podcast conversation with Alison Chou, founder of Double Happiness Bridal. While we began by discussing bridal consignment, we quickly found ourselves talking about something much larger: hospitality, emotional safety, modern luxury, and why "normal" has quietly become aspirational again. When Normal Became Aspirational As someone who spends a lot of mental energy contemplating the mysteries of the bridal universe, I’ve recently noticed that many bridal businesses are still operating from assumptions that no longer feel entirely true. For decades, the bridal industry has orbited aspiration. The role of a bridal brand, bridal salon, publication, or wedding vendor was to help couples access a version of themselves that felt elevated. More luxurious, more polished, and perhaps more refined than their daily selves. More beautiful. To some extent, that promise still matters. Of course, people want beautiful things. They want exceptional craftsmanship, expertise, and to feel special. And why shouldn’t they? But something I’m less convinced of is whether they still want to feel transformed. Increasingly, I think couples are looking for something else: they want to feel recognized. Those two things may sound similar, but they’re fundamentally different. Aspiration is focused on who you can become. But recognition focuses instead on making sure you are seen for who you already are. For years, bridal has largely been built around the former, yet the more brides I speak with, the more I suspect the latter is becoming far more important. And this shift may explain a surprising number of changes happening across the industry. It may explain the growth of bridal resale, the increasing demand for customization, and why so many couples are abandoning traditional wedding formulas in favor of celebrations that feel more personal, more intimate, and more reflective of their actual lives. Most of all, it may explain why warmth has become so valuable. Businesses aren’t typically discussed in terms of feelings. We’re more comfortable talking about business models, market opportunities, growth strategies, and consumer trends. And, to be transparent, that’s the path I intended to take my conversation with Allison Chou [https://www.instagram.com/doublehappinessbridal/] of Double Happiness Bridal [https://www.doublehappinessbridal.com/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQPOTM2NjE5NzQzMzkyNDU5AAGnMbYwTLPy1E7QxRNLSwvttox5-2uLp67oXvMpwcSxiDw_x3i1OeURQgYQiRc_aem_6zFLqMMftYDXOcAF4b8GvQ], a luxury bridal consignment showroom based in New York. But somewhere along the way, the conversation took a different turn. When I sat down to chat with her recently, one of the first things Allison told me about Double Happiness Bridal [https://www.doublehappinessbridal.com/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQPOTM2NjE5NzQzMzkyNDU5AAGnMbYwTLPy1E7QxRNLSwvttox5-2uLp67oXvMpwcSxiDw_x3i1OeURQgYQiRc_aem_6zFLqMMftYDXOcAF4b8GvQ] was that she wants brides to feel like they’re coming over to a friend’s house. Not a showroom, not a luxury retail environment, and not a sales floor. A friend’s house. Even the name itself offers a clue to what she’s building. “Double Happiness” is a traditional Chinese wedding symbol, formed by placing the character for happiness beside itself. Allison explained to me that it represents shared joy, partnership, and good fortune, and you’ll find it everywhere at Chinese weddings, from invitations to decorations. As a Chinese-American founder, she envisioned a business that wasn’t simply about buying and selling dresses, but about extending the life of meaningful garments and multiplying the stories attached to them. The first time I visited Alison’s space, I took my shoes off at the door. We sat on the couch. We chatted. Nothing felt performative. Nothing felt intimidating. Nothing felt like I needed to prove I belonged there. This model sounds almost beautifully simple, and yet the more I thought about it, the more unusual it seemed. Luxury has spent decades perfecting aspiration. Hospitality, on the other hand, often feels like an afterthought. The irony, of course, is that aspiration and hospitality are not mutually exclusive. A business can be beautiful, elevated, and deeply welcoming all at once. Yet somewhere along the way, many luxury businesses began behaving as though exclusivity required distance. Which raises a larger question. Why Does Luxury So Often Feel Like It Doesn't Want Us There? More than a few years ago, on my own bridal journey, I walked into a luxury bridal salon and immediately felt as though I was doing something wrong. Nothing inherently bad happened. No one was blatantly rude. No one told me I didn’t belong. Yet I found myself speaking more quietly, standing up straighter, and suddenly becoming aware of every possible way I might reveal that I wasn’t their intended customer. Funnily enough, the damning thing that sticks out in my brain all these years later was disrobing in front of the salesperson and immediately becoming very aware that my undies fell squarely into the “comfortable and practical” camp, and not the “cute and matching” one. It seems so strange to me that this feeling is remarkably common. Most people can recall a luxury experience that made them feel small. A boutique where they felt judged, a showroom where they felt underdressed, or a sales experience where they spent more energy proving they belonged than deciding whether they actually wanted what was being sold. We rarely talk about this because it feels superficial. Embarrassing, even. But the longer I spend observing bridal, fashion, and luxury businesses, the more I think it reveals something important. Why does luxury so often feel like it doesn’t want us there? And perhaps more importantly, why have we accepted that as normal? The Hospitality Gap One of the most curious contradictions in luxury is that many businesses claim to sell aspiration while delivering intimidation. Historically, this made a certain amount of sense. Luxury has always relied on scarcity. Scarcity creates exclusivity. Exclusivity creates desirability. Desirability creates demand. The formula worked. For decades, luxury communicated value through distance. Distance from the ordinary. From the accessible. Distance from everyday life. The problem is that somewhere along the way, many brands began confusing exclusivity with hospitality’s opposite. They forgot that making people feel special and making people feel unwelcome are not the same thing. And of course, bridal inherited many of these behaviors. The traditional bridal experience often asks consumers to enter unfamiliar environments governed by unspoken rules. Sample sizes may not fit their bodies. For many brides, the disconnect runs even deeper. They may not see themselves reflected in the imagery. They may not share the cultural references being presented to them. They may move through bridal spaces feeling technically included but not necessarily understood, and there’s a meaningful difference between representation as a marketing exercise and genuine recognition. Pricing is frequently opaque. Expectations are rarely explained. And the emotional stakes are extraordinarily high. Many brides spend months worrying whether they are making the right decision while simultaneously navigating spaces that make them feel as though they should already know the answer. The result is an experience that can feel surprisingly alienating for an industry built around one of life’s most personal milestones. This isn’t universally true, of course. There are wonderful boutiques, stylists, and designers doing incredible work. But it is common enough that almost every bride has a version of my story: The appointment that felt transactional, the consultant who seemed disinterested, the pressure to purchase on the spot, the sense that they were being evaluated rather than understood… For an industry built around celebration, that should probably concern us. Bridal Resale and the Question of Stewardship At first glance, luxury bridal resale appears to be a story about economics. And certainly economics are part of it. Weddings are expensive. Designer wedding gowns are expensive. The ability to recover a portion of that investment matters and, in our current economic climate, proposes a real opportunity to alleviate a lot of the roadblocks brides experience. But, to be frank, I suspect something deeper is happening. For much of modern consumer culture, ownership has been treated as the final destination. Acquire the object > Possess the object > Keep the object The object itself becomes the reward. But wedding dresses have always complicated this logic. A wedding dress isn’t valuable because of what it is. It’s valuable because of what happened in it. Its significance comes from memory, symbolism, and experience. Perhaps that’s why bridal resale feels so emotionally distinct from resale in other categories. Because passing a wedding dress forward doesn’t necessarily diminish its meaning. In some cases, it expands it. Listening to Allison describe the brides who consign through Double Happiness, I was struck by how often they talk about their dresses not as possessions but as participants. Some leave notes. Some share photographs. Some want to know who eventually wears the gown. The language is surprisingly intimate. It feels fitting that a business named Double Happiness would emerge from this idea. The goal isn’t simply to move inventory, but to allow joy, memory, and meaning to compound. The dress becomes part of a larger story… A vessel moving between people, places, and milestones. Not everyone wants to participate in that model, and they shouldn’t. Some dresses belong in closets.Some belong in families.Some deserve to be preserved for generations. But the growing acceptance of resale suggests that many brides are becoming more comfortable with stewardship than ownership. They’re less interested in permanence and more interested in continuity. That shift feels cultural as much as economic. The Return of the Guide One of the most interesting things happening in bridal right now has very little to do with dresses; it has to do with people. For years, expertise became increasingly specialized. Every problem had its own expert, every category had its own niche, and every service had its own lane. Yet the professionals who seem to resonate most deeply today are often difficult to categorize. They’re part stylist, part editor, part therapist, part strategist, part curator, and part translator. They’re not simply helping clients choose products; they’re helping clients make sense of themselves. The most memorable bridal professionals are rarely the ones with the strongest sales pitch. They’re the ones who know how to ask questions: Tell me about your wedding.Tell me about your relationship.Tell me about what isn’t working.Tell me how you want to feel. These aren’t transactional conversations… they’re interpretive ones. During our conversation, Allison described brides arriving with insecurities, uncertainties, family expectations, and competing opinions. Rather than immediately solving those problems, she talked about listening first. Not correcting. Not persuading. Not selling. Just listening. … which struck me because that skill is so rare, not only in bridal but in business more broadly. I increasingly believe that interpretation is becoming one of the most valuable services in luxury. Since consumers have access to more information than ever before, what they lack is context. They don’t need more options. They need help understanding which options matter. The Future of Luxury May Be Hospitality When we think about the businesses that are generating genuine loyalty right now, they rarely succeed because they’re the most intimidating. They succeed because they are the most trusted. Trust is built through consistency, expertise, and thoughtfulness. But it’s also built through hospitality. Through being welcomed, listened to, and understood. Through being given enough space to make an honest decision. The irony is that hospitality requires a much higher level of sophistication than intimidation ever did. Truthfully, anyone can create distance, but creating trust is harder. Anyone can create aspiration, but creating belonging is harder. Anyone can sell a product, but helping someone feel recognized requires something else entirely. Attention. Empathy. Curiosity. Confidence. Because truly confident businesses do not need consumers to feel intimidated. They need consumers to feel comfortable enough to ask questions, to be honest, and to choose. And that’s what I keep returning to this year… the possibility that luxury itself is changing. Allison shared a phrase she often tells brides: “It’s not that deep.” She wasn’t talking about marriage or commitment… she was talking about aesthetic choices. The dress. The styling. The details. Her point wasn’t that weddings are frivolous. Quite the opposite. It was a reminder that the things carrying the greatest meaning are rarely the things we spend the most time optimizing. At the very end of our conversation, Allison told me that she and her husband have an inscription engraved inside their wedding bands. It reads: We have fun. It’s not a grand philosophy or a sweeping declaration of love. It’s not an attempt to distill a marriage into a perfect sentence. Just: We have fun. The longer I think about it, the more it feels like a fitting prescription for what ails bridal. For years, luxury has asked consumers to rise to the level of the brand. But increasingly, the most compelling brands are doing the opposite. They’re meeting people where they are. And perhaps the same can be true for weddings. The wedding is deep.The marriage is deep.The commitment is deep. But maybe not every decision needs to carry the impossible burden of transformation. Sometimes the most meaningful experiences are the ones that allow us to feel recognized rather than reinvented. Sometimes the most luxurious thing of all is being welcomed exactly as you are. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit showroomtheory.substack.com [https://showroomtheory.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Episode 19: The Return of Folk Bridal with Hayley Claire Neil (Rolling in Roses)

Editor’s Note: This essay accompanies a conversation with designer and Rolling in Roses founder Hayley Claire Neil on the Showroom Theory podcast. We talked about Britishness, Patti Smith, costume design, regional identity, sewing, subculture, and the quiet disappearance of ordinary beauty from fashion. What follows isn’t a recap of that episode, but a continuation of the ideas we covered. What gets lost when bridal becomes globally optimized? There’s a moment that happens to a surprising number of brides during wedding planning… They walk into a bridal store expecting to feel reflected back to themselves and instead feel strangely alienated by what’s being presented. This feeling doesn’t arise because there’s a lack of choice. If anything, bridal has never offered more choices than it does right now. But somewhere between the algorithm, the aspiration, and the endless optimization of contemporary femininity, much of bridal has become emotionally repetitive. The same silhouette, the same styling, and the same visual language are reproduced endlessly across cities, countries, and feeds until everything begins collapsing into a single aesthetic ecosystem. You can open Instagram in any global city and instantly understand exactly what I mean. And somewhere within that flattening, bridal lost a sense of texture. It lost locality, specificity, subculture, and ordinary beauty. It lost the feeling that garments belonged to real life rather than the image economy. That tension sat at the center of a recent conversation with designer and founder of Rolling In Roses [https://www.rollinginroses.co.uk?utm_source=chatgpt.com], Hayley Claire Neil. Hayley’s work feels quietly resistant to the globalization of bridal aesthetics because she chooses not to engage in anti-fashion, anti-romance, or anti-beauty tropes and instead operates from a place that’s just deeply uninterested in performance for performance’s sake. Bridal’s Sameness Issue One of the most interesting parts of our conversation came when Hayley described shopping for her sister’s wedding dress nearly fourteen years ago. At the time, what she encountered was a bridal landscape dominated by “cookie-cutter” silhouettes and a singular, highly traditional idea of femininity. What struck me most wasn’t that the industry lacked variety then. It’s that despite how much variety technically exists now, many of the same emotional frustrations remain. Bridal no longer operates through one dominant archetype. Instead, it operates through dozens of highly marketable micro-archetypes:the cool bride,the boho bride,the minimalist bride,the coastal bride,the fashion bride. But archetypes nonetheless. As Hayley pointed out, social media expanded choice while simultaneously accelerating sameness. Brides have gained access to more aesthetics in recent years, but they’ve also become increasingly aware of the pressure to fit neatly inside one. What interests me now is not whether bridal offers enough options. It’s whether those options actually feel emotionally recognizable to the women choosing them. Because increasingly, many brides seem less interested in becoming “the bride” and more interested in remaining themselves. That distinction matters. The Return of Regional Identity What makes Rolling In Roses [https://www.instagram.com/rolling_in_roses/] particularly compelling is not simply that Hayley’s designs are ethically and sustainably produced or independently made in-house. It’s that the work feels rooted in place. Not a trend or virality, but physical place. During our conversation, Hayley spoke about observing a period in British bridal where many brides were gravitating toward highly beach-oriented Australian-inspired aesthetics despite having weddings that looked nothing like that culturally or geographically. That disconnect fascinates me because it reveals something much larger about modern fashion culture: global aesthetics increasingly override local identity. And bridal may be one of the clearest examples of that phenomenon. There was once a time when regionality shaped weddings far more visibly than it does in 2026. Local climate shaped fabric choice and whether or not a bride wanted sleeves vs. delicate spaghetti straps. Architecture shaped the ceremony. Local customs and traditional dress shaped silhouettes, styling, and atmosphere. But now, digital culture compresses those differences into a flattened aspirational language optimized for mass appeal. But fundamentally, Rolling In Roses resists that flattening. The collections feel distinctly British, though not in a theatrical or costume-like way. The garments are practical. They’re unfussy and convey a sense of emotional groundedness. A kind of romantic realism that feels deeply tied to Northern England itself. Importantly, Hayley never speaks about this from a branding perspective. In fact, throughout our conversations, she repeatedly framed many of these instincts as subconscious rather than strategic. And honestly, I think that’s part of why the work feels so authentic. It hasn’t been reverse-engineered from trend forecasts or audience metrics. It emerged naturally from the environment, her personality, and a love of music, craft, and lived experience. Ordinary Beauty One phrase that kept resurfacing in my notes before our interview was “ordinary beauty.” Not ordinary as in forgettable but ordinary as in emotionally legible and familair. Modern bridal often prioritizes spectacle: the reveal, the photograph that’ll garner ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhhs,’ the cinematic veil fluffing moment, the viral image. But Rolling In Roses leaves room for something more subtle. It leaves room for recognition. There’s a line in the conversation where Hayley describes struggling to design anything that feels “fake” or emotionally disconnected from reality. And that honesty permeates her work. These pieces don’t seem interested in overpowering the wearer. Instead, they allow space for a person to remain visible inside the garment. That may sound obvious, but it increasingly isn’t. We are living through a period where women are under enormous pressure to become visually exceptional at all times. Bridal often amplifies that pressure to its absolute extreme. The expectation is not simply to look beautiful, but to become a perfected version of femininity itself. And I think many of us are exhausted by that. Another thing that struck me during our conversation was just how often the language of relief surfaced.“Thank God I found you,” brides tell Hayley. There’s a sense of relief from expectation, from sameness, and from needing to perform a version of womanhood that doesn’t feel emotionally true. Music, Subculture, and the Anti-Algorithm One of my favorite places to find inspiration is within music. And Hayley shares that feeling. Patti Smith, PJ Harvey, and the role music plays in Hayley’s creative life fundamentally inform her design ethos and the way she commands space. The influence of music culture on Rolling In Roses feels immediately obvious once you notice it. Not in a literal sense. The collections don’t read “rock and roll bride.” Instead, they carry the emotional looseness that exists within artistic subculture. A culture where characters like Patti embody romantic messiness, individuality, human texture, imperfection, and conviction. Hayley mentioned frequently returning to Smith’s advice to “concentrate on the work” whenever she feels overwhelmed by outside noise. That philosophy feels almost radical within contemporary fashion culture, where visibility often risks becoming more important than substance. And I think this is why independent brands rooted in actual subculture resonate so deeply right now. They aren’t designing primarily for algorithms. They’re designing from scene, from reference, from lived cultural experience. And those are very different creative frameworks. The Romance of Making Things Toward the end of our conversation, we began discussing sewing, smocking, domestic craft traditions, and the emotional significance of tactile labor. Because I think we’re watching a broader cultural return to tactility. Analog skills like film photography, handmade ceramics, mending, gardening, print media, visible process, and slow craft sppear to be everywhere. After years of digital acceleration, people seem desperate to reconnect with the physical world again. They’re feeling a pull to both be hands-on and see hand-on processes. Bridal sits uniquely inside that shift because weddings themselves are inherently tactile experiences. Fabric matters. Texture matters. Hands matter. And unlike fast fashion, bridal still allows room for slowness. For fittings.For customization.For hand-finishing.For narrative.And for care. Artists like Hayley spend countless hours researching the thousands-of-years-old history of smocking techniques across different cultures. And what a blessing that is, because I think so many brides are actually cravin not simply a beautiful dress, but connection to process, lineage, artistry, and human hands. They don’t want empty nostalgia or performance. They crave something far more enduring than that, and their buying power follows suit. What Survives At the end of every podcast episode, I’ve come to ask guests what they hope survives in bridal over the next decade. Hayley’s answer was simple: smaller, more considered, more hands-on, more authentic brands. I’ve been thinking about her answer ever since. Because I don’t actually believe bridal needs more innovation… I think it needs more texture. More of the things we discussed in so much detail. More emotional specificity. More regionality. More cultural perspective. More room for imperfection, sincerity, memory, and ordinary beauty. Less optimization.More humanity. And perhaps most importantly, more designers who are willing to protect the soul of their work rather than scale past recognition. That, to me, feels like the real future of bridal. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit showroomtheory.substack.com [https://showroomtheory.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Episode 18: You Don’t Need More Inspiration... You Need a Stylist with Katie Balis

Editor’s Note: This essay accompanies a conversation with bridal stylist Katie Balis on the Showroom Theory podcast. A few weeks ago, before the craziness of Bridal Fashion Month, we spoke about creative process, where to find inspiration, and how the stylist functions as a conduit for decision-making. What follows isn’t a recap but a continuation of those ideas. A closer look at what inspiration fatigue means in an industry that runs on reference. The modern bride doesn’t need more inspiration.She’s already drowning in it. A bride today sees more wedding imagery in a single week than her mother likely saw in years. Before she’s even articulated what she likes, she has already absorbed hundreds of versions of what a bride is supposed to look like. Not just silhouettes or fabrics, but entire identities. The effortless European bride.The downtown bride.The archival-fashion bride.The “quiet luxury” bride. The images arrive pre-loaded with emotional instruction: this is sophistication. This is taste. This is what photographs well. This is what people understand immediately. And somewhere inside all of that visual noise, there’s still a person trying to figure out what actually feels like them. The Loss of Interpretation As I’m prone to do, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how bridal inspiration functions in our Pinterest-driven age, and, more specifically, what we've lost as bridal media shifted from editorial curation (during the golden age of print media) to digital content systems. This isn’t some nostalgic plea for the return of print magazines (or is it?) or old gatekeeping structures. I’m well aware that there are incredible independent publications, writers, stylists, photographers, and creators working today. But structurally, something did change. Bridal didn’t lose content. It lost its interpreters. There was a time when editors, stylists, and photoshoots didn’t simply show brides what existed. They contextualized it for them. They filtered and prioritized it. They shaped the way people learned to see the world. What felt fresh. What felt overdone. And what carried emotional weight versus what was simply circulating. But now, bridal culture is often shaped far more by visibility than by vetting or taste. By repetition more than discernment. And the psychological impact of that shift feels impossible to ignore. The Modern Bride Isn’t Lacking Inspiration Recently, I spoke with LA-based bridal stylist and consultant, Katie Balis [https://www.katiebalis.com/], about visual culture and the strange overwhelm of modern wedding aesthetics. One of the things that most resonated with me during our conversation was how little of her work actually centers on introducing her clients to entirely new ideas. Of course, as founder of The Kismet Project [https://www.thekismetproject.com/home], Katie is always at the ready to usher in new concepts, but much of what she specializes in is actually about helping brides locate themselves underneath the noise. Not “what’s trending.”Not “what photographs best.”Not “what’s getting engagement.” Just: what feels true. Which sounds simple until you remember how difficult it’s become to separate genuine desire from aesthetic conditioning. The modern bride isn’t lacking inspiration. Not in the least. Instead, she’s lacking orientation and someone to translate it for her. This is partially why I think the role of the stylist has become so psychologically important. Not because brides are incapable of dressing themselves or because every wedding requires luxury-level fashion intervention, but because we’re living through a moment of extraordinary visual saturation and, therefore, extraordinary confusion. Endless references create the illusion of clarity while often producing the exact opposite effect. What many brides are experiencing is aesthetic overwhelm, not freedom of choice. Emotional Prescription I think about this every time I see a new mention online about finding the “perfect” wedding dress. It’s the ‘Say Yes to the Dress’ moment, recreated across salons all over the world: The expectation is that the bride will cry immediately. That will cause her mother to cry with happiness. Then everyone will gasp on cue, “That’s the one!” Entire generations of women were raised on highly produced emotional performances around bridal identity. We’re not only shown what a bride should wear. We’re shown how she should react to wearing it. And if your experience doesn’t mirror that script exactly, it can feel a lot like failure. But most bridal experiences are quieter than that. They’re more complicated, more internal, and deeply nuanced. Sometimes the dress isn’t wrong, but the performance surrounding it is. And sometimes what a bride actually needs is less input, fewer opinions, and more distance from the constant pressure to optimize herself visually. A Closed Reference System Katie [https://www.instagram.com/katiebalis/] and I also discussed the idea of the bridal industry functioning as what I’m calling a “closed reference system.” Bridal referencing bridal referencing bridal. The same draping.The same corsetry.The same “effortless” styling cues repeated until they stop communicating individuality and begin communicating recognition. When everything references the same thing long enough, it starts to collapse into itself. And what makes certain stylists, photographers, or designers feel distinct right now is often not technical skill alone, but the fact that their references originate outside the bridal ecosystem entirely. Film.Paintings.Interiors.Travel.Texture.History.Architecture.Memory.Place. Katie described her process of constantly taking photos while traveling: strange colors, bookstore corners, fabric textures, fleeting compositions that she may not even fully understand in the moment. And while she might not know what those snapshots will become in the moment, something in those frames insists on being remembered. That, to me, feels fundamentally different than scrolling until you recognize something you’ve already been taught to want. Recognition vs. Resonance There’s a difference between recognition and resonance. Between I’ve seen this before, and this feels like me. And maybe that’s the deeper issue sitting underneath all of this. Not whether weddings have become too trendy or whether social media has “ruined” bridal, but how difficult it’s become to locate an authentic person inside a culture built on endless visual comparison. A stylist, at their best, doesn’t simply help someone get dressed. They help create clarity. They notice when someone is shrinking inside of a look that photographs beautifully, but feels completely wrong. They help distinguish between a reference image and an actual POV. They peel back the layers until the bride is no longer trying to resemble an idea of beauty, one that wasn’t even hers to begin with, and instead feels recognizable to herself. It’s the kind of discernment that has become increasingly rare. Not because people have stopped caring about beauty or originality, but because modern visual culture rewards immediate legibility over introspection. It rewards what’s quickly understood, quickly circulated, and quickly replicated. And that’s not what Katie is focused on when she guides her brides. Somewhere Beneath the Noise The biggest idea I’ve been circling this year is this: weddings aren’t meant to function like content ecosystems. At least, not entirely. They’re emotional containers, rituals, and memory-making exercises. They’re tiny temporary worlds built around two people trying to express something meaningful to one another and the people they love. And perhaps the real challenge now isn’t finding inspiration but learning how to hear yourself underneath it. To distinguish between what feels beautiful because it’s everywhere and what feels beautiful because it feels like you. Somewhere beneath the screenshots, the saved folders, and the endlessly circulating images, there’s still a person trying to recognize themself clearly. Maybe that’s what good styling really is. Not transformation.Recognition. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit showroomtheory.substack.com [https://showroomtheory.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Episode 17: What We Remember Was Chosen For Us with Alicia Rinka

Editor’s Note: This essay accompanies a conversation with photographer Alicia Rinka on the Showroom Theory podcast. We spoke about weddings, image-making, and the quiet power of selection. What follows is less a recap and more an extension of that conversation. A closer look at what a photograph does after the moment has passed. The Image Becomes the Memory To me, a photograph feels like tangible proof. Proof that a moment existed exactly as it appears, held still and preserved for a lifetime. I often find myself staring at photos wistfully, remembering scenes exactly as pictured with a unique blend of nostalgia and confidence in my recall of the moment. But, in fact, photography has never functioned as simply a neutral record of time. Every image we see represents a series of decisions: what enters the frame, what’s left out, where the eye is guided, and what is softened, sharpened, or made to linger. In the context of a wedding, this process carries significantly more weight than we tend to acknowledge. Already dense with meaning, a wedding is ritual, performance, transition, and projection happening all at once. And when that kind of event is filtered through a lens, the resulting frames don’t simply reflect the day… they define it. Thus, what we remember later isn’t actually the full experience. It’s a storybook version that has been selected, shaped, and returned to us. And over time, that image solidifies as memory. What we see, becomes what we remember. Selection Is the Story In practice, wedding photography does something more precise than preserving the truth of the moment, and it’s much more powerful as well. It constructs a narrative through emphasis. Where certain moments are elevated, others are quietly excluded. The camera may linger on a laugh, a kiss, or a perfectly lit embrace. Meanwhile, hesitation, grief, awkwardness, and silence (all frequent attendees of our most special moments) often remain undocumented, even when they’re just as present. What remains isn’t necessarily a lie, but it’s not the full truth either. It’s an artfully curated emotional arc - intentionally constructed by an artist with their own vision. And with that comes a heavy sense of responsibility. This matters because weddings aren’t singular in tone. They hold a contradiction. Joy and fear exist at the same time. There’s excitement, sure, but there’s also some degree of uncertainty. There’s celebration, but also a sense of a chapter closing behind you. Sometimes people are missing from the room. Relationships are shifting in real time. And all of that happens within a matter of hours. Yet when we look back, the record we hold often feels streamlined, clean, and decisive. Almost too coherent. Not because those other emotions were absent from the experience, but because they weren’t chosen for the gallery. The Narrowing of Emotion Scroll through wedding imagery today, and a pattern becomes difficult to ignore. We see movement, energy, and spectacle. Regular appearances from the dance floor, the champagne, and the cinematic kiss monopolize our focus. Images are vibrant and immediate, optimized for quick recognition and faster engagement. And much to the chagrin of some, they’re also remarkably similar. Of course, this isn’t accidental. Over the years defined by The Knot, Brides Magazine, and endless online wedding archives, the visual language of weddings has been shaped by platforms that reward clarity, repetition, and instant emotional payoff. Certain types of images travel further. They’re easier to process, easier to share, and easier for the viewer to recognize as desirable. Over time, those images inevitably become standard, and what quietly falls away is range. We begin to see fewer images of stillness. Fewer moments of interiority, of doubt. Fewer glimpses of the quieter emotional undercurrents that define the day as much as the celebration itself. Emotion isn’t missing from modern weddings; it’s being filtered. And what remains is an incomplete picture of the experience overall. I recently spoke with wedding and bridal fashion photographer, Alicia Rinka, and she said it so simply during our conversation: “We do a disservice to our clients when we’re not trying to capture their authentic self.” And the disservice is not in creating beautiful images. It’s in narrowing what’s considered worthy of being remembered. Letting a Moment Breathe Sometimes there’s a tendency within image-making to intervene. To refine, direct, or adjust. To move people into better light, cleaner compositions, and more legible emotions to produce the best possible tangible memories. Sometimes that instinct produces something striking. Other times, it replaces something more interesting with contrived falsehoods. To an onlooker, one of the more overlooked choices a photographer can make is restraint. Alicia described this in a way that makes perfect sense. “Let things breathe.” It sounds simple, but this requires a different kind of attention. It requires the willingness to observe without immediately orchestrating. To recognize when a moment carries its own structure and doesn’t require third-party correction or improvement. Restraint refines the moment; it doesn’t remove intention. And the decision to step back, to wait, or to allow something imperfect to unfold fully still determines what will be seen later. It simply shifts the emphasis from control to perception. In that space, something more human tends to emerge. Between Impact and Experience There’s another layer to consider here, one that sits slightly adjacent to the ceremony itself. With the explosion in popularity of image-based social media, bridal fashion has become increasingly visible. Runway imagery circulates instantly, with millions of consumers (not always brides) following along as designers release new work. Collections are designed with a clear visual impact in mind - meant to be seen, shared, and interpreted at scale. Alicia chalks it up to a specific dichotomy. “Designers create for impact. Weddings are lived.” Photography moves between these two worlds. It translates the visual language of fashion into the emotional language of a ceremony and brings the precision of design into contact with the unpredictability of lived experience. At times, that translation collapses any distinction, and weddings begin to mirror the visual expectations set by runway imagery. This causes the event to shift, even subtly, toward performance, and the question becomes not whether this is good or bad. It’s whether we’re even aware of it at all. When an image carries both the influence of fashion and the weight of real experience, the photographer becomes the point of interpretation… the one deciding how those two forces meet. Slowing the Image Down Toward the end of our conversation, Alicia spoke about a project that she’s since launched called A Written Memory. This personal side quest pairs Alicia’s photographs with personal correspondence, a contextual letter attached to a moment frozen in time. In a landscape where images are consumed in seconds, often without context, attaching language to a photo changes its function. It slows the viewer down and anchors the photograph in a specific experience rather than leaving it open to endless projection. It also reveals something we tend to overlook: images are rarely complete on their own. They gain meaning through context, through narrative, and through the perspective of the person who created them. Pairing image and language reintroduces that meaning and asks the viewer to stay with it a little longer. To consider not just what’s visible, but how it was seen. The Observer’s Position When I asked Alicia how she understands her role, she answered without hesitation. “I’m an observer of life… and the observer has the power to shape.” There is a quiet precision in that statement. Observation is often framed as passive… something that happens before the real work begins. But in reality, it is the work. The act of noticing, of deciding what matters, of recognizing where meaning is forming. From there, the image follows. So this is where that idea of documentation begins to unravel. To observe is to interpret. To interpret is to shape. And even the most unobtrusive presence carries influence. The camera doesn’t sit outside the moment. It’s an active, albeit inanimate, participant. What Lasts? So I’m challenging myself to think of photographs not as a way to hold onto the past or as a way to keep something from slipping away. Because in practice, the role they play in our most important moments is something more active. They give form to memory. They create a version of events that can be returned to, shared, and eventually inherited. Over time, that version becomes familiar enough that it replaces the original experience in subtle ways, which isn’t inherently a problem. It’s simply a part of how memory works. And what matters is awareness. A wedding can never be remembered in its entirety, but it can be remembered through what was seen, what was captured, and what was preserved. And the image doesn’t simply reflect the day; it becomes the way the day is understood. Once that happens, the photograph is no longer just proof that something occurred, as I previously believed. It’s the story itself. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit showroomtheory.substack.com [https://showroomtheory.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]