it comes in waves
creating > consuming + what i've been wearing lately
I stumbled on one of Nicole Ho’s photos on Instagram last year while I was doing a midi skirt formula edit. I saved it and reposted it not knowing who it belonged to.
Coincidentally she saw the picture and messaged me, we started talking and a friendship began: long DMs about fashion, objects, motherhood, creativity. We’ve never met—she’s in northern California, I’m in the Florida panhandle—but over time, we kept finding overlaps: both immigrants, both creatives, both married to men in the same profession, both mothers, both drawn to the act of getting dressed, and the shallow/deep aspects of style.
In December, while I was in Miami, another one of those coincidences happened. I was at Biscayne Bay around 6 p.m., that time of day when the light hits the water and it glitters just right. I opened my camera to capture the ripples, zoomed in, and without planning it, a dolphin emerged right where I pointed.
In that vast expanse of water, the dolphin surfaced in the exact spot I chose.
Since then, dolphins have circled around my project, as a metaphor for La Deeply Shallow—those creatures of depth and play. I started hunting for them: vintage brooches, ‘90s t-shirts, small objects with stories behind them.
Meanwhile, Nicole had quietly started her own project, Gushi Studio (Cantonese for story)—curating, sourcing, and restoring pre-loved objects.
I admired her work immediately: not just her eye for finding beautiful objects, but the care she gave to each piece. The way her hands transformed them. It felt so aligned with everything we’d been talking about these past months—that creating matters more than consuming. That sometimes the only way to quiet our nonstop overthinking minds is to make something. That creating won’t save us from pain or despair, but it will sustain us, allow us to feel pain and discomfort in a different way.
Naturally, we thought: let’s do something together.
And so this small collaboration was born:
four necklaces made from pendants we sourced online—some vintage, some antique, some second-hand—restored, cleaned, reimagined. Strung on silk cords, leather, and chains.
And yes, of course they’re dolphins.
I said to Nicole: if no one buys them, I’d be happy to keep them.
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After the necklaces were finished, another part of the collaboration began: creating the audiovisuals (branding??) inspired by lo-fi, collages, & ’90s surf graphics as we are so into board shorts and the whole Quicksilver nostalgia:
Eventually, we figured we were channeling David Carson—-his aesthetic and body of work now cemented in the history of graphic design:
“it comes in waves”
that was the name we chose for the collaboration after I realized I’d saved the same phrase twice: once in a photo I took of someone’s hoodie at Chick-fil-a in December, and again last week, the same phrase on Pinterest while looking at the dolphin frescoes in the Palace of Knossos.
And then, as if this wasn’t already like a Paul Auster novel (you know how his stories are always circling back on themselves), Nicole opened her jewelry box to find a chain for one of our necklaces. Inside: a dolphin (!!!!!) pendant her grandfather had given to her years ago.
It was meant to be.
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So here it is: a small collection of pieces that came together the way friendships sometimes do: out of nowhere, unexpectedly, across distances, connected by shared instincts and the pull of superficial beauty, but also, of something deeper. The very human desire to create.
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Premonitory.
Since I know some of you are here for the fashion,
I’ll leave you with a few summer outfits I’ve been wearing lately that would obviously look great with a dolphin necklace:
Speaking of butter yellow…have you been following Vogue Runway lately? All the mustard yellow ready to take over the stick of butter yellow we’ve been seeing for years now (trend precursor, at least to me, was
.)Not an easy color to combine, for sure, but if you want to be a mustard yellow early adopter, I styled my vintage Pepa Pombo mustard yellow skirt on this post and I thought it might be a good start!?
And last but not least:
Ok today was a lot. See you next Friday!
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🐬 L.
Ahhhh all sold out already! Congratulations! 😭😭😭
What an enjoyable read. I love how your dolphin encounter connects to your friendship and then turned to a motif in your own fashion!