As soon as I disembark the plane in Alaska I immediately feel like I've landed on a different planet. As I wander this blue-white ice world, the only hint that I'm on earth are the occasional gas stations I encounter. But in this radically different setting, the familiar feels uncanny, only heightening the sense of difference. The light, the landscape, the desolation, the quality of the air are all so alien, I decide to name this planet M78. So now I'm less on this trip as a tourist as I am an explorer and anthropologist.  

So as I encounter the amazing Inuit (which is still referred to as Eskimo in this part of Alaska) artifacts in Anchorage museums, it is imbued with the magic of the alien, not the merely earthbound. These are the artifacts of the civilization that abducted me and brought me to their strange world. The crafts, the clothes, the prints, the myths, the shapes, the symbols of Eskimo culture are all so beautiful and new to me and I feel inspired to create a collection. The fuller shoulders in my garments parallel the thickness of Eskimo clothing. I also experimented with various types of trim to evoke Eskimo textures. The shapes on my garments were drawn from Eskimo prints. The cold blues, grays and blacks of the collection came from the color palette of this forbidding ice world.

But my inspirations were not restricted to the Eskimo. Given that I was on alien planet M78, I also drew upon science fiction motifs. You can describe the collection as Eskimo-futurism. In designing this collection, I got to re-inhabit the foreign and strange world, a world of beautiful aliens I was sad to leave.