“Metamorphosis” is the second half of the Selkie Spring 2024 collection, a transition from girl to woman. We shift the perspective from searching for fairies and dancing in mushroom rings to shedding our cocoons and becoming butterflies. A fictional commune of characters bring these clothes to life. I pictured a group of girls living in an abandoned home, tending to their garden, sewing pillows, cooking mushrooms, taking mushrooms, dancing wildly under the moon, always together.
Inspired by my youth in Santa Barbara in the 90s- living in a hippy group home with my dad- I found power in chanting, breathing, and free dancing to Enya. Each year, we watched the monarchs migrate through the woods on the bluff. Their gently flapping wings so dense it looked as if the trees were breathing. We stood still as they landed on our clothes, careful not to disturb these magical insects. It was a pivotal time, where we watched and participated in the solstice parade, making its way through town at the start of every summer – an assemblage of generations and descendants of the world's first hippies, making their way through the crowds on roller skates and floats. We were on the edge of our own transformation then- butterfly teenage babes, learning to use makeup and wear bras, and measure ourselves against society's standards of beauty.
Monarchs are our mascots. The cliché metaphor of a butterfly somehow still rings profoundly true, no matter its overuse in literature. For we love her, the butterfly– a symbol of life, change, and death. She is our symbol of time, as transformation is time's language, and everything occurring at this very moment is constantly changing - now, and now, and now. Linear time exists only as memory and prophecy. We search for ways to understand our lives, digging maniacally for the deeper meaning behind each passing moment, as if not knowing is some torture!
And so the beautiful butterfly unfurls, seemingly to guide us.
Oh! What a divinely feminine creature! Mystical, delicate, beautiful, fragile - we find ourselves in you. The most common tattoo, we wear you permanently like a tiny, colorful god.
Our goal can be to simply embrace change. Or even better- to celebrate it! Each wrinkle, every curve, every pain and hardship, let them pass through us as we declare thanks.
