The first thing I did in New York was not visit a museum. I sat on the subway and watched people get dressed in my head.
In one train car I counted a sari under a puffer jacket, a Senegalese print wrapped like armor, a quinceañera-pink nail set holding a coffee, cowboy boots that had clearly seen a real ranch, and a girl in head-to-toe black whose gold hoops were doing all the talking. Nobody was in costume. Everybody was in uniform: their own.
Style here is a language people refuse to forget
What moves me about this city is that people do not dress to disappear into it. They dress to stay visible to themselves. You can be third generation and still carry your grandmother's country in a fabric, a color, a way of tying a scarf, a hemline your mother would recognize across the street.
Every culture seems to keep its accent somewhere different. Some keep it in print and color. Some keep it in silhouette, in how fitted or how flowing a garment is allowed to be. Some keep it in occasions: what you wear to church, to a wedding, to Sunday lunch, stays sacred long after everything else has gone casual. New York does not melt these accents down. It puts them all in one train car and lets them talk.
What a designer from Medellin does with that
In Colombia I learned to design for bodies I knew, in a culture I knew. New York is teaching me the opposite skill: designing for women who carry ten cultures in one closet and switch between them by Tuesday.
It has made me more sure of what La Bloom is here for, not less. I am not going to water down where I am from to fit in. The city is proof that the opposite works: the more honestly you wear your origin, the more this place respects you. So the corsets stay structured. The bias cuts stay sensual. The Spanish stays in my captions.
Bloom where you are planted, yes. But I would add what New York taught me: bring your own soil.
Tell me: what piece in your closet still speaks your first language?
Con amor,
Sara