La Mue begins with fashion, but it has never really been about clothes.
I’m interested in what we ask of them. How we use them to construct an identity, inhabit a version of ourselves, or distance ourselves from another. How a silhouette can become a statement, a uniform a form of protection, and getting dressed a way of negotiating our place in the world.
Fashion is never just what we wear. It carries memory, desire, contradiction. It reveals what we choose to show and what we would rather keep hidden. At times, it gives form to what we don’t yet have words for.
La Mue follows these questions wherever they lead. Into the body, into identity, into loss and reinvention.
Fashion is the point of departure. The subject, more often than not, is what it means to become someone else without entirely leaving yourself behind.
I also write about fashion itself. Where it comes from, what it claims to be, and what it reveals about us when we look closely. I approach it the way I live it, with love, with irritation, and rarely with the same opinion twice.
Sometimes I start with a dress and end up questioning my entire personality. Which, I’ve come to realise, is usually when things get interesting.
Each chapter captures a version of me I can’t quite return to. The things I wore, the things I cared about, the questions I couldn’t answer, the things I thought I had figured out. Some of it I might disagree with now. Some of it might make me cringe. But it was me, then, and I want to remember her.
THE NAME
In French, la mue is the moment a snake sheds a skin that has become too small for the body growing underneath it.
The old skin has served its purpose. The body has changed, and it needs room to grow into itself. There is something brutal about that process, and something strangely beautiful. The snake doesn’t decide to shed its skin. It simply grows until the old one can no longer contain it.
That image stayed with me because I recognized something of myself in it.
This period of my life was a Mue of its own. There was loss, exhaustion, loneliness, and questions I couldn’t answer. A few versions of myself had clearly reached their expiration date.
For a long time, I lost sight of who I was. Not dramatically. Quietly. The way it happens when you spend years finding the right words for everyone else and gradually lose touch with your own.
Somewhere in that silence, I felt the need to return to my own creativity. The part of me I had spent years lending to everyone else.
I had to make room. Let certain things fall away without pretending they had meant nothing. Keep what they had taught me, even when I was ready to leave them behind.
La Mue became a way of making that process visible.
I’m still inside it