I studied counseling because I wanted to understand what happens inside a woman before she ever opens her closet door — the voice that decides, long before the mirror does, what she's allowed to want.

I studied nutrition because I wanted to understand bodies without moralizing them. What I learned instead is how much shame gets handed to women in the language of health, and how rarely that shame produces anything good.

I practiced and taught yoga for nearly two decades because it was the one room where women stopped performing and started noticing — how they felt, how they moved, what they needed. Feeling first. Looking second.

And I sat with women struggling with body image and eating disorders. Brilliant, funny, capable women who had been taught to treat their bodies as ongoing problems to be solved. That work changed the questions I ask.

Alongside all of it, I loved style. Fabric, color, proportion, the particular pleasure of a piece that feels like it was made for the life you actually live. For a long time those two things sat in separate rooms.

Then it became obvious: style didn't have to start with hiding, minimizing or fixing. It could start with feeling. With what a woman loves. With who she already is.