Tell me what’s the story behind Duomo is and what represents?

[ Duomo ] is something I want to live outside of myself. It started as a personal creative escape for me. I sort of created this church for myself that I could always look to if I ever felt lost or needed direction. It wasn’t long before it took hold of my life and became a religion to me.

I think I’ve become a bit infatuated with the idea of being hard to find. It’s sort of like the feeling of falling in love with a song that no one has ever heard before. You want to share it with everyone but at the same time you want to keep it all for yourself. I love that feeling.

When did the fashion bug bite you? What drives you as a designer and why?

I know exactly where and when this happened. One of my earliest memories was exploring the basement of my aunt’s house. My aunt was a mystic and fortune teller. She also used to be a seamstress so she had all these machines and tools I had never seen before packed away down there. I remember seeing a dressform for the first time peeking out all covered in cobwebs. It looked like this strange headless person in the darkness with misshapen arms and that image stuck with me forever. I think it was the fact that it scared me so much that I was drawn to it and wanted to know everything about it.

I often think about why I became so interested in fashion because I never pursued it at any point in my life prior nor was I ever educated in anything to do with fashion. It was always this faraway concept to me. Fashion was something that happened on TV and was worlds away for people like me.

What drives me is the feeling I get from losing myself in the process. There’s a certain magic that exists no place else when you’re cutting things apart and sewing them together. It’s a story that no one will ever really know about until it’s finished.

People only ever see the end result of the story. With fashion anyone can continue these stories by wearing them. These pieces can become something completely new and personal to someone you’ve never met. Someone wearing a piece of that story can live in the memory of another person just because they might’ve passed them on the street in a red dress nobody has seen before. Maybe in a few years that dress will end up in a shop somewhere far away and take on another life with someone new.

Black and red are detectable colours in your collections? What is your statement behind this edgy aesthetical choice and why?

I think I’m a bit obsessive. I won’t move forward until I know that the next step I take is a step forward. I’ve made a rule for myself that I am not allowed to design anything in any other color until I can’t think in any other color beyond red – or until I feel like I’ve given that color justice.

I’ve always thought of colors as feelings. I’ve only recently decided to start working with red because I was at a point in my life where it was either give up or push on and see what happens. This was a really dark chapter in my life. I was in a really bad car accident. It seemed as if everything bad that could happen to someone started to happen to me, so I took all these feelings and started to transmute them into something positive.