For a long time we'd wanted to make something that didn't fit neatly into our usual collection — a dress form that was really a piece of art in its own right. The wish was there. What we didn't have was the idea.
We kicked around plenty of directions over the months, but nothing stuck. If we were going to spend the time on a one-of-a-kind piece, it had to be something we actually felt strongly about.
It showed up after Katerina, one of our team, went to see the new Michael Jackson biopic. She's been a fan for years, so it's probably no surprise she came back to the office the next day still thinking about it — and not only about the music, but about everything he shifted in fashion, in stage performance, in the way one artist could define a whole era.
By the next day she'd said it out loud: what if we made a dress form inspired by Michael Jackson? After months of going in circles, the answer felt obvious almost right away. This was the project we'd been missing.
We took the idea to an artist we'd worked with before. She liked it enough to put her other projects aside and start sketching that same week.
One thing we agreed on early: this wouldn't be a portrait or a copy. We weren't trying to recreate his face. We wanted to catch something harder to pin down — his creative energy, that instantly recognizable visual style, and the mark he's left on generations of performers, designers, and fans.
The piece grew as it went. Every detail was painted by hand, and a lot of the design came out of trial and error — testing things, talking them through, changing our minds, trying again.
Looking at it now, the finished form is only half of why we're attached to it. The other half is how it came together: a film, a conversation, a handful of sketches, and then this object that sits somewhere between fashion, art, and craft.
There's only one of these. We never planned it as a "limited edition" — it just turned out to be the kind of thing that only works as a single piece. And honestly, that's a big part of why it stayed with us.
