FML Designer Spotlight: VENIA
Dear Los Angeles, Sincerely, VENIA
Some runway shows, you merely observe from your seat, but VENIA’s Dear, Sincerely pulls you out of yours. For those that missed this live presentation, every guest at the front row seats was gifted a letter and a goodie bag containing a single tarot card upon arrival; no two the same per individual; so that long before the models strutted down the runway, the evening had already transitioned into something irreducibly more intimate, despite sitting shoulder to shoulder among several hundred people who came to the same event.
Christine Ko and Keeter Ly Behind Venia
Presented by Anima Initiative, this showcase was VENIA’s latest Spring/Summer 2027 collection. This offering landed at a precise moment as it marked the brand’s 10th year and first large-scale runway show in Los Angeles, where it was born and bred. Designers Christine Ko and Keeter Ly, founded VENIA on a fairly uncomplicated but solid premise: products mostly made entirely by hand, almost always in natural and sustainable fabrics, and built around storytelling of migration, belonging, and the identities people carry across borders. Their style skews more niche, drawing a specific kind of devotee, even though the door is open to anyone who walks through it. But that’s intrinsically by design; a more particular,word-of-mouth audience tends to be more loyal. Visually, the label speaks a dialect adjacent to the likes of Rick Owens and Yoji Yamamoto; severe, draped, and edgy. This new collection borders somewhere a bit different. “Dark renaissance” is the closest description: the same gothic weight but a bit warmer, more ornamental.
VENIA’s instinct toward intention is precisely why the show’s collaboration with this venue mattered as much as it did. Griffith Park’s Travel Town Museum is not your typical fashion venue, but a functioning archive of a historical railroad station, not a backdrop set up to appear as one. A train station, by nature, welcomes whoever needs to pass through it and only shuts its doors for the last departure. The runway show was invite-only, but the immersive world built around it opened to the general public hours earlier; musical performances scattered across the grounds, a Love Letter Station, AR installations by VIBA, 360 Filming by 4DV Ai, and a bazaar, just to name a few. From 2 p.m. to 7 p.m., this entire collective experience was thoughtfully engineered to feel like a private one. A high-production event like this cannot be pulled off so simply without a sound philosophy beneath it, making it all the more memorable and distinct. Starting with “The First Hello” and closing with “The Last Goodbye,” the 6 p.m. runway presentation sat near the end of that arc.
Dear, Sincerely unfolds across five chapters in a singular journey: discovery, adaptation, memory, integration, and departure. As the show started, the thick fog had settled low over the concrete, and the light cut through the old rail cars where the runway had sat against. Every prop on the grounds was placed with a reason behind it, not just to fill a frame. For every look that passed by during the show, the clothing itself looked like it already lived through some of that journey. The color palette stayed disciplined throughout: black, ivory, neutrals, and splashes of color like burgundy dark enough to read like a bruise. Tailoring carried most of the weight: floor-length pinstriped overcoats, vests layered over crisp shirts, flat caps set at an angle where practicality meets style. Clothes built for someone in motion, dressed to not only arrive but also impress. The gowns however, softened things without losing the mood, voluminous cream and black silhouettes with side-slit skirts gathered and draped, kept honest with tall black boots.
One particular piece stood out from the rest, worth mentioning. A two-piece set printed with what Ko dubbed as, “chaos language”, an AI-generated script constructed from fragments of every both Eastern and Western languages layered and meshed together until none of them remained individually legible. Not Mandarin, Korean, Japanese or Thai; not English, French, Russian or Arabic; and yet somehow still all of them at once. It isn’t gibberish so much as a new construct of an alphabet, born out of meticulous collision rather than inheritance; belonging to none of its sources and all of them at the same time. The idea is almost too simple once spelled out, yet hard to stop musing over afterwards. Since the dawn of humanity, cultural identity has never been one clean script. It’s what’s left over time after a multitude of them get pressed together long enough. Intricate details like this explain how VENIA has such a strong hold onto its consumer base. The word Ly used to describe what happens after a piece leaves the studio was “transference”. Once someone purchases a product, it becomes theirs to shape and wear into something the label might not have initially intended or predicted. The garments (and story) aren’t finished when they’re sold, but rather handed off mid-sentence and continues on.
But here’s the cinematic image that pulled the whole show into focus: a model walking the runway with a worn leather suitcase, past the train car, holding it as if it carried everything that mattered. This styling almost read like a confession. But all of this gives more context once you read the letter. Tucked inside every invitation, was a personal note from the brand. One line stuck out: “At its heart, Dear, Sincerely is a love letter.”And it is, though not to a particular muse, season or trend cycle. This letter was meant for anyone who’s had to become someone new somewhere else and to Los Angeles itself, a city defined by reinvention and arrival, and VENIA chose this moment to finally send it.
By the time the last look came down the runway through “Departure” it ended on a note and metaphor that left everyone stewing over: a train station is never truly built for endings. It’s existence serves to keep things moving. That’s the real thread running through Dear, Sincerely. How far you can travel and still find your way back to where you actually started? The globally inspired techniques, fabrics, and silhouettes that move through VENIA’s collection aren’t just another aesthetic. It’s an argument that beauty is not singular, that identity is not fixed, and that every encounter leaves us changed in ways we carry in our bodies long after we’ve forgotten the details.
