VENIA’s “Dear, Sincerely” Finds Beauty in What We Carry Forward

For VENIA, fashion begins with a question: what do we carry with us when we leave, and what do we leave behind? With its SS27 collection, Dear, Sincerely, the Los Angeles-based sustainable luxury atelier turns that question into a meditation on migration, memory, belonging, and the continuous exchange between past and future.

Founded by Christine Ko and Keeter Ly, VENIA approaches fashion through its philosophy of “Graceful Rebellion”, a belief in questioning convention without sacrificing refinement, integrity, or care. In Dear, Sincerely, that philosophy takes shape through a collection inspired by the emotional space between a final goodbye and a first hello.

“Dear represents the hello, Sincerely the goodbye, and everything in between becomes the story,” the designers explain.

The collection began as a response to a world that, in recent years, has often felt increasingly divided. Rather than reflecting that division, VENIA wanted to explore what becomes possible when different people, cultures, and histories meet. Travel became the starting point: not simply as physical movement, but as a metaphor for discovery, adaptation, memory, and transformation.

That idea feels particularly at home in Los Angeles, a city VENIA describes as “a city of arrivals.” People come carrying languages, traditions, family histories, and memories of home, creating a place where different identities exist alongside one another. As children of immigrants, Ko and Ly see that layered sense of identity as deeply familiar.

“We don’t see identity as something singular or fixed,” they say. “We’re interested in what happens when different worlds meet and begin influencing one another.”

Los Angeles has also shaped VENIA’s attraction to contradiction. The city can be beautiful and brutal, polished and industrial, historic and constantly reinventing itself. Those tensions mirror the house’s own approach to design, where fantasy and reality, heritage and innovation, and technology and handcraft are allowed to coexist.

For Dear, Sincerely, that dialogue reaches back to the Second Industrial Revolution and the emergence of railway travel. VENIA was initially drawn to the visual language of the period, the tailoring, machinery, uniforms, architecture, and romance of travel, but found a deeper connection in the role railways played in bringing distant worlds together. They moved not only people, but languages, goods, ideas, technologies, and cultures.

VENIA sees a parallel with the technological transformation of the present. Today, digital tools have made the world feel closer than ever, yet the collection asks what must remain “unmistakably human.” For the designers, the answer lies in both the hand and the mind.

VENIA embraces CLO 3D, digital patternmaking, emerging textile technologies, AI-assisted art development, and 3D-developed silhouettes, while continuing to work through traditional draping, dyeing, garment construction, and patternmaking. Rather than treating technology and tradition as opposing forces, the atelier sees them as collaborators.

“There was never [a question] between technology or tradition, but how the two can move forward together without losing what makes creation human,” they explain.

That belief becomes especially tangible through the collection’s textiles. Among the materials developed for Dear, Sincerely, two custom prints, Forgotten Futures and Oxblood, serve as particularly important storytellers. Forgotten Futures layers handwritten correspondence, postcards, maps, archival documents, weathered architecture, and fragments of language, creating an image of memory accumulated through movement.

Its markings recall different systems of writing, overlapping until their origins become difficult to place. The effect mirrors the experience of arriving somewhere unfamiliar while still finding fragments that somehow feel like home. The past becomes more than something to preserve; it becomes material for imagining another future.

Oxblood offers a quieter counterpoint. Its deep red-brown shade references a color associated with the historical period behind the collection, while also recalling the literal color of oxidized blood. Printed over a delicate floral jacquard, the combination places something visceral against something fragile. For VENIA, the contrast reflects the shared humanity beneath differences of language, nationality, culture, and history.

Both textiles were developed using an experimental double-sided printing process, allowing imagery and color to interact from opposite sides of the fabric, producing variation, depth, and unexpected bleed.

This emphasis on materiality is inseparable from VENIA’s understanding of sustainability. The designers describe seeing a receding glacier firsthand as the moment sustainability became personal rather than abstract. Since then, the atelier has focused on natural materials while considering sustainability across development, production, quantities, and relationships with makers.

Patterns and samples are developed in-house at the Los Angeles atelier, combining traditional techniques with digital tools such as CLO 3D and Tukatech to reduce unnecessary sampling and improve accuracy. VENIA also works with smaller mills and vendors, produces in considered quantities, and uses globally sourced responsible materials.

The result is an intentionally slower way of building. For VENIA, those limitations are not obstacles but part of the creative architecture of the house: a reason to be more intentional about what is made and why.

Ultimately, Dear, Sincerely suggests that leaving is never simply an act of departure. “You continue to carry pieces of where you came from,” the designers say, while making room for the people and experiences encountered along the way. Migration, in this vision, is not erasure or replacement, but accumulation.

That idea sits at the heart of VENIA’s SS27 collection. Every garment, textile, and technique becomes part of a larger story about what survives movement and what changes through contact. Heritage is not frozen; it evolves. Technology does not have to erase the hand; it can work alongside it. And luxury does not have to be defined by rarity or perfection, but by intelligence, provenance, craftsmanship, and intention.

For a house building its identity in Los Angeles, Dear, Sincerely becomes both a love letter to a city shaped by arrivals and a reflection on the journeys that shape us all. In VENIA’s world, every goodbye contains the possibility of a hello, and everything between them is where the story begins.