Showroom Theory

Editor’s Note:

This conversation with Lela Orr unfolds at a moment when luxury, fashion, and bridal are quietly renegotiating their values. What emerges isn’t simply a profile of a designer, but a broader inquiry into what luxury is becoming: slower, more intimate, more durable. This accompanying essay explores those shifts - the rise of slow design as cultural resistance, the return of ceremony in consumption, and the role bridal continues to play in shaping identity - through the lens of a changing industry.

Luxury is in the middle of an identity crisis.

Fo...

This essay is a companion to Episode 7 of the Showroom Theory podcast, a conversation with LA-based bridal stylist Alysia Cole about visibility, authorship, and refusing the makeover machine. The ideas here expand on that conversation and push it further - into culture, commerce, and what the next era of bridal could become.

Bridal culture doesn’t just sell dresses. It sells the idea that a woman must optimize herself before she is worthy of being seen. This essay unpacks the psychological, cultural, and economic cost of that lie and imagines what a more humane future of bridal co...

Alignment Without Articulation Is Incomplete

There’s a particular story told to women, founders, and creative people of all creeds about what growth is supposed to look like.

That story basically says, ‘if you’re truly mature, truly grateful, truly aligned, your wanting should soften into patience.’ Your edges should eventually smooth out. Your ambition should become quieter, more contained, more presentable.

We call it composure.We call it professionalism.We call it wisdom.

But over the past year, I’ve been circling something in my mind that refuses to stay quiet:

Editor’s Note: This essay accompanies this week’s episode of the Showroom Theory Podcast, featuring Kennedy Bingham of Gown Eyed Girl. While the conversation explores bridal through Kennedy’s voice and lived experience, this piece widens the lens - examining authorship, aesthetics, and power in an industry shaped by visibility and constraint. The episode and this essay are meant to stand independently. Together they trace the same question from different angles: who gets to decide what bridal is, and who it’s for.

After a decade in this industry, I’ve come to know that there is a speci...

There’s a moment in bridal every once in a while where the energy shifts - not because someone published a revolutionary trend report, and not because the industry has declared a silhouette du jour, but because someone releases a collection that feels like a counterspell. A soft refusal. A reminder that weddings, at their best, are meant to be enjoyed, not optimized.

And For Love’s Creative Director, Angel Spendlove, has attempted to cast that very spell with the line’s newest collection, The Lovers Part II, and her approach is less about “what’s trending” and more abo...

Scarcity, identity, enclothed cognition, and the cultural scripts that shape modern weddings.

There’s a moment in almost every bridal appointment when the bride goes quiet. She knows the dress fits. She knows it looks beautiful. But something in the cells of her body does not recognize herself in it.

It’s the pause before the panic - the quick collapse inward, where logic loses to a kind of ancient emotional memory. The common belief is that brides spiral because they’re afraid of choosing something unflattering. Of choosing the “wrong” dress. But that’s such an over...

There’s a reason bridal feels different right now, and it’s not because we collectively woke up craving oversized veils and Rococo-level ornamentation. The recent surge in maximalism, romance, applique, pearlwork, and exaggerated femininity isn’t a spiritual or cultural awakening. It’s the algorithm.

In this episode, we break down how TikTok, Pinterest, and the content economy have become the new tastemakers for modern ceremony. Bridal trends today don’t emerge from ateliers, archives, or even influence cycles in ready-to-wear - they’re produced, rewarded, and recycled through platforms that rely on novelty, pattern recognition, and emotiona...

Welcome to the first full episode of Showroom Theory! Recording this one felt like putting a stake in the ground. Not because I’m trying to define bridal culture, but because I’m finally giving language to things I’ve felt for years, working behind the scenes.

I’ve always believed bridal deserves a deeper conversation than it gets. Not just:“What dress is trending?” But:Why does this choice feel so personal?Why does it matter so much?Why does it feel like a tiny piece of autobiography?

This episode is my attempt to answer that...

Welcome to Showroom Theory, a podcast about the emotional, aesthetic, and psychological layers of modern ceremony.

I’ve spent more than a decade inside the world of luxury bridal - in fittings, in ateliers, in the quiet rooms where women meet themselves in the mirror. And the more time I spent there, the more I realized something no one was really saying out loud:

Bridal isn’t just an industry.It’s an emotional climate.A cultural text.A place where identity, beauty, lineage, and personal mythology quietly collide.

Thanks...