I write to you from a terrace five stories up in an old colonial home overlooking the city and mountains of Oaxaca. Breakfast was a fresh cup of cafe con leche and a homemade churro slightly over-crisped to the point of perfection. This little bed & breakfast is run by women who have opened up their home to share it, create a fresh breakfast each morning, and translate a true Oaxacan experience for those curious.
I came to Mexico looking for inspiration. Not to get work done. Not to find a big idea. Not to do nothing. Not to do something. To just be in a new place, in a new state of mind. I got a one-way ticket having no idea how long I'd want to stay, and two weeks in and a few days away from returning home, I’ve got what I came (or didn’t come) for.
Something I’ve learned between Italy, Spain and now Mexico especially is there is little intrusion between nature and material. The homes are built into the land using natural materials and they aren’t perfect in the way we’re used to at home. The stucco wears, the cracked and worn saltillo is the color of the earth, the trees form around the buildings or maybe the buildings form around the trees and sometimes the trees grow right from those buildings, and the paint falls off the walls only to expose years of stories lived inside them. Whatever the opposite of a sterile aesthetic is, this is so perfectly it. There’s a richness to it, an ease, a natural connection to the land that these people come from and how they live among it, within it, in harmony with it every single day. How the food they eat is both a symbol of the season and what their body craves subconsciously this time of the year. We’ve lost that harmony and I long for it when I drive down the highways searching for untouched back roads; when I leave the trees and drive into the billboards and the cement jungle; when I eat food that has no connection to tradition but it is fast and it is easy and aren't we always in a hurry.
I don’t mean to wax or maybe I do because this longing for soul is an honest one. This desire to live harmoniously is an intention to remain connected to the truth.
This short journey paired with the other ones I’ve been so damn lucky to have taken over the years thickens my commitment to doing something different with Bomē.
It began with the skirt. I wanted to design the one garment I felt was missing from my closet - a skirt I could wear all day, any day, anywhere. Now I see a bigger vision for an entire collection, how all these pieces work together to create something - an entire closet - that I don’t have but crave to wear on my body. A feminine, tailored, natural capsule collection that within it holds sacred space for self expression. (As I type this live mariachi carries on in the background and off in the distance is the banging of hammers, faint spanish conversations and the inconsistent hum of a motorcycle heading for somewhere. I keep writing...). This collection will be made by materials nurtured, gathered and created by people who have learned their techniques not in years but in generations of families and traditions and beliefs that everything we eat, wear and use, we know where it comes from and we make it intentionally.
I am creating a brand consciously and ethically that has as little intrusion from earth to closet as possible. A collection of garments where you can see and feel that what you’re wearing is real. I believe it is possible that we can feel more connected to the earth, and more connected to the people whose traditions and art made our materials, and that therefore our belongings are energetically and spiritually charged with energy we can feel - because they’re real.
For me, that’s the standard of everything I bring into my home and put on my body. We don't need more things, we need things that mean more to us. I write this wearing my indigo-blue cotton kimono given to me by a dear friend for my 30th birthday. I haven’t gone on a trip since receiving it where I didn’t bring this robe along because it’s the treasure I want to wake up to and go to bed with. It’s soft, it smells like me no matter how often I wash it, which is infrequent anyway, and it provides me with the comfort of myself and a sense of home no matter where I am physically, mentally or emotionally. What if everything we had felt like that?
I write to you from a moment of inspiration and within a space of deep gratitude and optimism for yet more dots to continue connecting themselves on my journey of shaping this brand and building my life. Bomē (pronounced like homie with a B) is a brand connected to something so much bigger than consuming more things. It is a brand, a belief and an intention that weaves story, humans, nature and self expression, and pulls us back into our roots of existence to remember that we are one; everything we do, wear, consume and use, is connected.
What do you want to be connected to?
With love from Oaxaca,
Chelsey