It’s a gift to have the time and opportunity to deeply immerse yourself in a subject, and that’s how I began the process of co-creating the concert Spectacle. The project grew out of Tonhain’s second concert season, Resist: The Sound of Defiance, which explores the many forms that resistance can take through music. As we began discussing an interdisciplinary collaboration between fashion and music, we found ourselves drawn to the Suffragette movement - a moment in history when women’s clothing became a powerful tool of visibility, identity, and political action. Paired with music by women composers who were navigating their own barriers in recognition and artistic legitimacy, it became the starting point for a rich period of research. A year ago, I started researching suffragette history — reading books and articles, contemporary feminist literature, and spending time with museum collections and historical photographs from the NYPL Picture Collection.
From that research, certain ideas stayed with me: the physical burden of women’s clothing, the movement and spectacle of their processions, feminine dress as covert messaging. I began thinking about how I could use original, contemporary designs as a storytelling medium to bring these ideas alive in the present day.
I decided to focus on four central themes, so that each musical work on the program could be paired with its own set of garments and conceptual context. Over time, this period of feminist history became incredibly vivid to me, and I wanted the audience to feel immersed in it as well. That became one of the guiding ideas of the evening: to engage multiple senses. In addition to the music and the garments, each performance was bookended by live dialogue. Crafting these conversations - distilling research into concise stories, visual references, and reflections - became a significant part of my creative process.
Beyond the concert itself, I created an art installation that remained on view in Tonhain’s front window throughout the concert season, as well as tactile souvenirs for audience members to take home — so that they could leave with a fragment of the garments and stories they had encountered onstage.
The concert sold out — we even searched the venue for extra chairs at the last minute! And although the days leading up to the performance were filled with rehearsals, testing quick changes, and last-minute technical adjustments, once the concert began, all of that fell away. Sharing these stories with a live audience — hearing moments of laughter, surprise, curiosity— gave me so much energy. It was deeply rewarding to feel the audience actively engaging with the ideas. Thank you to everyone who came and shared the evening with us.