I got into fashion, I mean, I've kind of always been interested in fashion, but I got more seriously into fashion, probably around 2013, I saw an exhibit at an art museum that was about Japanese fashion. It was like a 90s shockwave exhibit. And it was like talking about Issey Miyake and, Comme des Garcons and like, 90s designers who were doing more avant-garde fashion streetwear. And that's how I got more interested in it and then just kind of snowballed from there.

I feel like everyone has an eye and they pick things that they like and they may not necessarily be able to reverse engineer and explain, why they make certain decisions or, why they like certain things. It's hard to explain succinctly because I feel like my style ethos is like pretty different from most people's. Like I have a lot of different styles, I kind of look different every day. I don't have like one set house style or one genre thatmy overall style fits into. I kind of approach dressing more like costuming. My background is in production design, I see it more like the character for the day. Like, what I feel like and what I'm doing that day, and, a variety of factors influencing, like what I'm going to be like that day, and then I kind of build my outfit around that. Very different day to day, but overall, I would say it's like kind of theatrical. I just, I thought it was so magical, and I love just, world building. I wanted to do production design. Um, I love being able to transport someone visually which, absolutely happens with fashion and runway shows and all that like. I just like being able to create something that's out of, this time out of this place, like the fabrication aspect of it. I would say I see my fashion as kind of an intersection of costuming from film and art, self expression.

I'm non binary. If I feel confident or how I still struggle a lot with, or if I want to dress how I want to dress purely to do what I want to do or if I also want to dress in a way that people will gender me correctly, if I want to present more masculine affects my fashion. Which means sometimes sacrificing how I want to dress. I grew up in a very liberal enclave in Colorado. It was very diverse in a lot of ways, a lot of my teachers were, openly gay, so I had, like, a queer community from when I was a kid. Also, I'm half Japanese and half American or, you know, I'm half white. I was raised in a predominantly white community. So I had that ethnic influence. There were not a lot of Asian people. That was difficult, I just wanted to assimilate for basically all through high school. And then it wasn't until I went to college that I felt more comfortable. So, yeah, I had both of those growing up as a kid, both in my family and, my larger community. It was interesting, so my mom and her family, they're Japanese. But it's not, like, completely typical Japanese, because, my grandpa was, he lived in California during World War II, and then he was sent to an internment camp in Arkansas, and then he went back to Japan after he was released from the camp. And then, my family later came back. So they have kind of a difficult relationship with America and Japan, both of them. They're thoroughly Japanese American, I would say, like not Japanese, so there's like a mix of cultures there. And then on my dad's side, I think they tried to have me as immersed in Japanese culture as they could, but it was very limited where I grew up, like there weren't any other Japanese people. There was like a couple Japanese stores that like grocery stores that sold Japanese food, but it was a little bit like fraught, I guess. I feel like I'm Japanese American because, I have a lot of cultural influence and stuff, just instilled from my family. To a lot of white people, they see me and, I'm not white. To them, like, I'm just Asian. So, you know, my whole life, experienced life like an Asian person, and that's definitely, influenced me.

It was like a process that happened in multiple stages. Not like one blossom at once. You know, kind of figuring out, my artistic identity is one step and then my racial identity and then, you know, socially figuring out where I was. I don't know, I think a lot of mixed race people feel like they're like caught between two things that they don't really fit into either way. But for me, I mean, I don't really feel like I have to fit into being Japanese or being white. Like I'm comfortable being in the middle. I mean, being non binary just means your, your gender identity is outside the binary of like male and female. So that's part of it. I was also raised very religious. But I'm not religious anymore, but I'm not totally agnostic or atheistic. Like, I would say, I'm spiritual, so I'm somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. You know, generations from now, everyone will be mixed race, probably. So it's like, this is like a just, to me, it's not really the middle. It's probably just like a new identity. I don't really see it like necessarily as being like the middle, even though it is, it's just kind of like its own identity that is being formed.

I mean, fashion is influenced by so many different cultures across so many time periods. And I think what's really interesting about being born at whatever time you're born is that you can draw from anything that came before you. I'm not drawing from any culture I believe there are boundaries, but in terms of time period and European, Japanese and American fashion, I think that's what's really interesting is you can put together things that could only be made now because you can draw from everything that came before you. It's like something that's so difficult to pin down the line between appreciation and appropriation.

I just think that there's so much interesting inspiration to draw from, from all over the world, at all times, and I'm fascinated by history and researching historical fashion, it is really interesting.