Heavenly Body: a star, planet, celestial body, and some might even say extraterrestrial! As a designer, my main goal is to be extra! And my collection is exactly that. With my collection, I wanted to create couture pieces, each with their own unique structural moment, to highlight femininity in queerdom. In the queer community, you are often seen as what you present yourself as; either feminine or masculine and that determines your role within our community. As someone who likes to explore all realms of what it means to be queer: feminine, masculine, and everything beyond, the Haus of the Divine Femme presents to you Heavenly Bodies; my collection. With my collection, I wanted to showcase that presentation is a mindset, not a determining factor of you as a person. So often, femininity and androgyny are looked down upon and often not explored, even within the queer community. With the nod to queer ballroom culture, I explored the femininity that we are told is too much, too extra, in my designs. In this collection, you’ll see everything from my signature corset, glitz galore, and structures that I’ve hand created. Using unconventional materials and techniques like soldering!; these structures are to emphasize that we are here and we will stand out! Having my queer family here at Davis being a part of this with me, means the most to me and I can’t wait for us to strut and show everyone that we are truly out of this world!

For fashion majors here at UC Davis, DES 179, better known as Signature Collection is the senior capstone class. Starting in January, designers ideate and materialize a collection of 3 to 4 garments and present it in front of an audience at our annual Picnic Day Fashion Show. This past January, I had the honor to be in this class with 22 other students and present my collection at our Picnic Day Fashion Show held on 4/20/24. Working 4 months on this collection, I am extremely proud to document my process, thinking, successes, and failures. Through the many sleepless nights and caffeine breaks, I present to you Heavenly Bodies: A Collection designed, created, styled and all of the above by me, Avery Tomlin.

Going into this class, there was a lot of pressure on me from not only myself and my peers, but also faculty to produce something that was true to me but also something the general public had not seen before. Being known in my design department for utilizing unconventional materials and methods to create garments and structures, I knew that I somehow had to incorporate this into my collection. Being black and queer, I immediately knew that my collection had to highlight queerness in some way. As someone who likes to cross the lines of femininity, masculinity, and everything in between, I wanted my collection to highlight femininity in queerdom. Being something that even queer people don't feel comfortable in exploring, I wanted to push the boundaries of presentation and representation with my collection, something the show has not seen in its 50+ year history. With this goal, established early on, I got to sketching!

Before Winter Quarter started, we had to come into class with 10 original sketches, front and back, of what our collection could be! Working during the last week of Winter Break, I started the New Year designing and thinking of garments that would be uniquely me and interesting for the show. My process during this week of sketching and ideating, was to not force the creativity and let the ideas flow naturally. There were some days where the ideas were not coming to me and there were other days I was able to sit in my apartment with my music blasting, coffee in hand, and the creativity pouring.

Taking inspiration from designers like Daniel Roseberry of Schiaparelli, Harry Halim, queer fashion and trends, Instagram, Pinterest, and my own lived experience as a queer black man, here was what I was able to come up with that 1st week of the New Year. For these sketches, one thing that I knew that was going to be central to my collection was unique structures that I would craft in addition to the garment. These sketches came about due to the way my inspiration works; I can be inspired by anything from music, to architecture, to even nail designs to help fuel my idea into a unique garment!

On our first class 1/9/24, we had to present our sketches to our professor and teaching assistant in order to determine the 3 most cohesive garments that could create our collection. Based on those 3 garments, we then had to produce 3 more iterations of each garment, a total of 9 more sketches, to give more options in the final collection lineup by the next class. My 3 selected garments for my collection were: 

Here are my iterations of these garments: 

After careful consideration, I chose these 3 garments as the final collection. My collection underwent a name change from The Divine Feminine to Heavenly Bodies because someone actually had the same name for their collection too. Prompted to think more outside of the box, I was researching and came across the term "Heavenly Bodies". I felt like this encompassed my goal for the collection because it represents any body within outerspace giving it an out of this world, extraterrestrial connotation to the meaning. Being queer, I feel like this aligns with how I perceive myself; as someone who doesn't fit the mold of what it means to be cisgender male, I instead feel like an out of this world being with ideas, imagination, and talent to match. With that being said, I wanted my models and anyone wanting to explore femininity to feel the same way, and thus my collection was officially rebranded as Heavenly Bodies worn by The Divine Femme, my models. I didn't want to completely lose the term "The Divine Feminine" so I changed the emphasis to instead represent my models and change it to be the The Divine Femme because Femme is a queer term used to describe a group of people, the very group I wanted to highlight in this collection. From here, the real 4 month journey begins!