In 1999, when I was 16 years old, Sophia Coppola released her film adaptation of The Virgin Suicides. I had adored the book, devouring each chapter from the sunny room of my dad’s house. The story and descriptions of girlhood felt like a mirror image of my own spiraling mind—minus the tragic surmise. Jeffrey Eugenides' tender prose is still profoundly touching even now in my 40s, and Coppola's rendition did not (and will never) disappoint.

Female directors were few and far between, especially in the 90s. It was quite a revelation to feel seen in such a well-rounded way, and a profound moment for me that piqued my interest in filmmaking—second only to The Brady Bunch, the first of many films that would inspire me. I felt a deep connection with the character of Lux Lisbon and the way Eugenides had written her; I felt he had looked into my world. I, too, was a teenager discovering the power of being a girl and the use of sex as a weapon. Oh, the brutal discovery that this will not win you love or keep you safe from the pains of heartbreak! 

The great expanse of a young girl's mind is not unlike the expanse of America's suburbs—wide and empty, begging for adventure. To see these streets for the first time as an immigrant child is quite a shocking experience. We came to California from our tiny English town and moved into a small one-story, three-bedroom home on a cliff's edge—the quiet Mesa of Santa Barbara. My parents got an ugly, used, giant silver Oldsmobile with grey polyester velvet bench seats in the front and back, so I could ride in the middle next to the driver. Unlike in England, automatic cars were the norm, with not a gear stick in sight. The ugly car was so big that as we rounded our Mesa corners, the entire family (who rarely used seat belts) would tip from one side to the other, laughing. It felt like sailing on cement.

Leaning out the window, I made a habit of counting each of the hundreds of bungalows as we zipped by, amazed to find not even one semi-detached home, and very few two-stories! It was so big, so flat! In California we could walk around barefoot on the warm, clean streets, and most days I found myself skipping shoes altogether. I'd throw on flip-flops and ride my beach cruiser a few blocks up to Carolyn's house. There we'd watch VHS tapes of Dawson's Creek, self-recorded. I'd made my own home-illustrated labels with each character drawn on the cardboard covers, which I wrapped with printer paper just like our giant textbooks.

After school I'd run to the curbside mailbox—oh so American—to grab my Delia’s catalogue and mark each perfect item with a red pen. It was so inspiring I planned my first fashion collection, “K Gordon Designs”, sketching outfits inspired by the catalogue’s pages, with Guess ads, JTT's Teen Beat photoshoots, and Drew Barrymore's tattooed belly plastered on my walls. We lived in gingham swimsuits and practiced makeup from the pages of Seventeen magazine, slamming down packets of Skittles as we learned to apply white eyeliner to our inner eye creases.

Shabby Chic was everything, and all the rich kids' parents' homes were adorned with mismatched florals and pastel patchworks, where our lanky, tan bodies stretched out on cozy pillows watching Now and Then and Spice World with sand in between our toes. There was a sort of heaven in this transience—we all knew it would end soon, just as summer camp ends, but we rarely acknowledged it. This twinkle in time came to define summer for me, and this Selkie collection is filled with reminders: polka dots and ginghams, doe fur, 90s patchworks, mermaid scales and butterflies, to name a few. It fills me with nostalgia and warmth to be able to wear my own expression of what the 90s suburbs really mean to me.