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The long-awaited apparel brand's first collection is inspired by sustained love and the ramifications that often accompany romantic desire.
By Skylar Mitchell·Updated August 15, 2024
The Tatiana Monet brand story is told in different phases of a love’s chronicle, traversing the changing textures of start, growth, loss, and renewal. Last fall, designer Tatiana Monét debuted the first item in her eventual collection: a poplin skirt forming a tutu-like bubble over five layers of tulle. Like Monét, the skirt was playful but declarative, hinting at an anticipated ushering in her artistic vision. Over the next several months, the bubble skirt concept gained momentum online and off, prompting a limited-run pre-release of the garment as modeled by Herrana Addisu. That was on New Year’s Eve, and Monét diligently worked on her Spring/Summer 2025 collection in the months since, which debuted in Brooklyn to an audience of close friends and collaborators.
That original skirt eventually became the brand’s Little Black Skirt and represents the young brand’s developing iconography in textile and concept. For the collection’s showroom launch hosted in the converted retail studio of designer Yara Flinn, the garment is prominently displayed as an almost sculptural element among hanging accompaniments.
Tatiana Monet’s Collection 001 is entitled “A Brooklyn Love Story,” an ode to the founder’s own journeys through affection in its various stages. An upstate New York native now based in Brooklyn, Monét has navigated this stage in her creative and personal development through an evolved understanding of depth and how it affects her work. Each of her thirteen collection items—all sustainably made and unisex—reflects this concept of dimension, featuring accents that nod to where Monét was when she was inspired to create.
The intimate subtexts of her love stories take life in the items she has created and exemplify how affection can simultaneously be directed into multiple spheres. Tatiana’s garments prominently address one’s love for community and the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood’s impact on her sartorial evolution. Monet worked in real estate before moving to the city to pursue fashion design. Despite professional successes, she realized over time that a significant change would best achieve her desired fulfillment. “I realized like it wasn’t it wasn’t feeding my spirit,” Monét tells ESSENCE.
“So, I got to Brooklyn, and it almost felt like the universe had placed me here. Everything was falling into place.” Leaving the comparative quiet of upstate New York for the spirited embrace of Bed-Stuy was a journey that transcended geography for Monét. It was a homecoming to a space that has, for generations, nurtured the brilliance of Black artisans and creatives—a neighborhood woven with threads of history, resilience, and a relentless commitment to community.
As “A Brooklyn Love Story” grew from the ideation stage, Tatiana was experiencing the impact of community-based love in real-time. The fashion designer did not arrive to abandon; they were welcomed, and celebrated. Their new home was a place where the streets pulse with the echoes of jazz and the vibrant energy of block parties, where neighbors become kin, and every corner tells a story. Some of the individuals from this period became collaborators during fittings, production days, and launch planning. Monét credits her friends with facilitating the fruition of her dreams dreams over the past year.
Monet’s debut collection takes a utilitarian approach to romance, offering structured, tailored garments that support fluid, confident movement. Many of the pieces are interchangeable for wear, presenting expansive opportunities for combination styling. Primary colorways flow between jet blacks, off-whites, and fiery reds, the chromatic embodiment of Valentine’s Day, a trio steeped in the iconography of romance and love. Red, bold and uncompromising, speaks to the intensity of passion, while white whispers of possibility, a blank slate where love can etch its narrative.
Black silks also ground this fervor in reality, reminding the Tatiana Monet patron that love’s depths are shadowed and profound. The rose, a motif in all these shades, enters as the ultimate symbol—delicate, fierce, and enduring—reflecting the myriad faces of love itself.
Tatiana explains that the Karla Top, a lined and structured bralette, can be purchased as a set with the Frederick Trouser or alone in cream and black Japanese cotton or luxurious red silk. The bra’s construction was “inspired by vintage balconette bras and elevated by complimentary grosgrain trim and straps,” Tatiana says.
The designer is a learned seamstress, training in the studios of Christopher John Rogers, among other decorated designers. During her months of draping, stitching, and fitting practice, she became a master of seams, which ultimately was brought to life in her debut collection’s offerings. The Karla top features clean vertical stitching, as well as two rows of hook and eye closures, underwire, and adjustable straps, which maintain support while allowing for a more revealing cut.
Accompanying themes of romantic and community love is the theme of self-affections, a concept materialized in expertly tailored functional pieces that take a comfort-optimizing oversized form. “We set out to make a trouser that was the embodiment of grounded confidence,” Monet writes via the official Tatiana Monet NYC Instagram page. Made of Japanese wool that gives enough weight to maintain form across different seasons of wear, the Kravitz pant evokes maximum power and confidence.
Each of these items presented at the physical launch was announced shortly prior in a digital campaign creative directed by the designer and her collaborator Ondrea Wheeler. The continuous world-building at play emphasizes the sum of Monet’s initial inspirations: desire and relationships. Love, as she exemplifies, takes many forms from romantic dalliances to the thoughtfulness of friends. These expressions of affection can transform and transmit energies towards art forms. The Tatiana Monet debut collection aims to teach that one can always source love from within, and continually give it to yourself, materially or otherwise.
Credits:
Creative Directors: Tatiana Monet @tatianamonettt + Ondrea Wheeler @_witchdaddy_
Photographer: Katherine Goguen @katherinegoguen
Talent: Mammina @mckellyayor
Gaffer: Lukas Cardoni @lluk45
Digitech: Creigh Lyndon @creighlyndon
Makeup: Dior @onlyonedior
Hair: Renee Brutus @rowsbyrenee
Stylist: Shea Stiebler @s_m__s._
Producer: Thandi Roe @thandiroe
Production Assistant: Sharmeen Chaudry @sharmeen.c
TOPICS: black designer christopher john rogers
