Mitchell Abbott 9/9/26 Mitchell Abbott 9/9/26

NOTHING WILL EVER FEEL LIKE THIS AGAIN—AND THAT’S THE POINT

Captured in the fashion district today, 9/9/26, by Mitchell Royel—a moment steeped in soft light and even softer shadows, where the hum of sewing machines harmonizes with distant chatter. We’re listening to "Outside" by Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding, the pulse of the beat weaving through the afternoon like a thread pulling it all together. There’s something hauntingly beautiful about the way the ordinary turns cinematic in the right frame, like everything is quietly waiting to be remembered.

There was a bubble once—a glistening, hermetically-sealed dome in which I lived. I existed like a pearl inside its shell, polished smooth, insulated from the grit that gives life its texture, its meaning.

Calabasas: an orchestration of manicured white suburbs, stitched together with sprinkler systems and a relentless politeness. It was a place where lawns glowed unnaturally green and conversations felt scripted. Everyone knew the same pop songs, wore the same Allbirds, and leaned on the same sunsets to give their lives the illusion of depth. I thought that was the whole world. I thought the horizon dissolved where the shopping centers did.

Then one day, I walked into a community college classroom, fluorescent lights buzzing around me like bees caught in a jar. That’s when I felt the first tear in the bubble—a seam splitting, an unraveling I couldn’t have named yet.

She sat two rows over, an exacting gravity in her slouched posture. Her textured hair spilled like defiance down her shoulders, and her eyes? They held stories of somewhere I hadn’t been, maybe couldn’t even imagine. She was every galaxy I had been told didn’t exist in neighborhoods like ours. Later, I’d tell my friends about her, breathless, giddy, as if naming her made her less unknowable. She kind of reminds me of Kelis, I said, grasping for comparison, trying to shrink her magnificence into something bite-sized, something familiar. But I was wrong. She wasn’t like anyone. She was her own weather system.

We started talking—one sentence at a time, the way people do when the universe nudges them toward a door they've been too scared to open. One night, as effortlessly as pulling a thread from her sweater, she opened a tab on MySpace.

That’s when I saw them.

Raves.

Freeze-framed bodies mid-motion, eyes glittering with reflected neon. Light bending around faces, distilling joy into streaks of color. Each photograph was like holding up a magnifying glass to an emotion I couldn’t yet articulate. I scrolled through galleries full of strangers but all I saw was life. Unapologetic, untamed life spilling out of monitors and into my chest, cracking me wide open.

"You ever been?" she asked, her voice curling with amusement, almost daring me to lie. She could already tell I hadn’t.

She started naming scenes—warehouses by railroads, deserts under full moons, clubs below the city’s heartbeat. Her words were spells, each syllable charged with rebellion and vastness. Places, she said, you have to be willing to sweat to find.

We must have talked for hours. Or maybe it was just minutes and it felt like hours; who knows? I didn’t belong to time that night. Near the end of our conversation, I asked her something pathetic like, "Do you think I’d fit in?" And she just smirked.

"You don’t have to come," she said, softly piercing in her understatement. “But you can.”

She wasn’t trying to convince me. She already knew.

I remember how casually she lifted her hand, gesturing toward the window. Outside, bathed in the sterile glow of campus lights, sat another girl—a petite figure bent over her books, her focus sharp even from a distance. The warm familiarity of her profile hit me like a puff of déjà vu. This was my neighbor—the girl whose back door opened just behind ours, who I sometimes saw weaving clouds of loose hair into braids at sunset. She hadn’t seemed larger-than-life until this moment.

“That’s my friend,” she said, her words nudging boundaries I hadn’t realized I’d drawn. “She and I go to raves together.”

It floored me. This wasn’t a secret society. It was her world. And she was presenting it as casually as an errant breadcrumb left on the table. The unspoken implication was unavoidable: You can sit with us.

She was a social butterfly, not the flimsy kind that floats lifelessly from one flower to another, but the kind bred from steel who knew when to stay, when to leave, and how to take the world with her. She made it look so effortless—holding the world loosely, like it was hers to give.

The first time I went to one of those house parties with her, it felt like stepping into an alternate dimension. The rooms pulsed with life, the music a liturgy of basslines, and every surface seemed to radiate a heat that wasn’t just physical but soul-deep. We didn’t need the fog machines or shifting neon to lose ourselves; the energy of those nights was enough to transform. And when the lights finally dimmed, we’d slip outside into the campus fields, her laughter tumbling over the cool grass as if it could stretch the hours longer. The conversations? They unraveled into the kind of sprawling reflections that only happen when the sky stretches too wide and you forget time exists. Those fields started to feel like a world apart, a sanctuary for questions and confessions, for ideas neither of us had words for yet. It was there, more than anywhere else, that she handed me glimpses of a world I hadn’t dared to imagine.

We kept moving, and two years disappeared the way rivers vanish into distant seas—impossibly fast but carrying every memory downstream, pulling all of us toward the next thing.

By then, she’d invited me to everything—house parties where time felt like watercolor light and, eventually, an LGBTQ+ club. My first one.

I remember the electric air. Bodies lit up with nothing to hide. People danced the way you can only dance when no one is watching—or when no one watching would dare judge you. They were free. And for the first time, I saw what that could look like.

But I was knotted inside. Something about that night wouldn’t let me join. I’d started dating one of her friends—and I hadn’t told her. It was easy to tell myself I didn’t owe her that confession. But the truth? She carried the kind of truth between us that demanded more than silence. Still, I froze.

"Something feels off. Is it…?" she asked me, her voice slipping over the music. I could see her scanning me, her concern like heat seeking a weak point. She saw mine long before I uttered a word.

"Nothing," I lied. That ancient lie, sharp and small like a broken shard of glass.

Instead, I offered another reality.

"In other news," I started, avoiding her gaze, "I’m dropping out. This is my last semester."

Her head tilted slightly, like she wasn't surprised, like she’d already sensed I was reaching my fire escape. She nodded—slow, deliberate.

"I feel you," she said. "I’m transferring next semester." Always a few years ahead in the dance, mapping exits I couldn’t yet see.

"What’s next for you?" she asked, her voice thinly cloaked in reassurance but heavy with illumination.

Truth pinned me under the light spills on the ceiling. "I’m not sure," I whispered. And for once, I meant it. "But I can’t stand it here anymore."

Which "here” did I mean? Not the club, not that night. I meant the other "here"—the one made of beige walls and fake smiles, suburban comfort that lulled me into a shrinking version of myself. The bubble I’d been born into. I couldn’t breathe there. Hell, I couldn’t live there.

-Ryder, M.R, GG Collective

Epilogue

I think of her often—the girl who reminded me of Kelis but ended up reminding me of myself.

Here’s something time taught me: the bubble? It isn’t safety. It’s sedation. And some people stumble into your life like minor gods carrying a necessary wake-up call, dragging vivid MySpace photos behind them like thunderclouds. They don’t say it outright, but they live it: Everything more is waiting outside your fear. Your responsibility is to step out.

The unknown terrified me. It tore me apart and then rebuilt me. But it also gave me everything: friendship that questioned my edges, sweat-soaked dance floors where I keyed back into my body, creativity blooming through the shattered monotony of comfort.

If this life of mine has a moral, it’s this: Find the cracks. The people who love you enough to push you toward them? They’re rare. And the unknown—it’s not a void. It’s an offering.

Go.

When you can’t stand it anymore.

Sweat through the heat.

And trust—you are meant to crack wide open.

Mitchell Abbott 9/8/26 Mitchell Abbott 9/8/26

NO LONGER BORROWED

Captured this morning by Mitchell Royel in the heart of the fashion district, these photos are a swirl of light and motion, spontaneous elegance caught in the lens. They’re not formally tied to the fine city of Agoura Hills or the halls of Agoura High, nor do they aim to define the spirit of the girls who call Agoura home—because, really, could spirit like that even be defined? This is just a moment in time, for entertainment, for the pure joy of creating something vivid and alive. Picture this—rooftops buzzing, city waking up, and in the background, Rihanna and David Guetta’s *Who’s That Chick?* pumping through the air, giving every step a rhythm, every glance a spark.

For the girls of Agoura Hills.

Who's that chick?

They said her before I ever said me.

I heard it in the hallways. I heard it at the light on Kanan, windows down, some song throbbing through the summer heat. I heard it whispered like a warning and worn like a crown.

The Agoura girl.

You know the one. Golden. Glossy. Effortless in a way that takes hours. She's got the highlights and the horses, or the fake tan and the flat stomach, or the daddy's card and the dead eyes. She's pretty and she's empty. She's a canyon town cliché in a crop top. She's beautiful and she's nothing more.

That's the story. That's the chick they meant.

And oh, I put her on.

I put her on like a second skin. I learned the walk. I learned the shrug. I learned how to want less out loud so I'd be easier to swallow. I learned to make myself into a surface — shiny, reflective, giving you back your own idea of me so you'd never have to meet the real thing underneath.

Because the real thing was inconvenient. The real thing had opinions. The real thing cried at sunsets over the Santa Monica Mountains and felt something ancient move in her chest when the wind came through the oaks. The real thing was too much. So I made her less.

I became who's that chick. And it worked. God, it worked.

But here's what nobody tells you about wearing a mask that fits so well.

You forget where your own face is.

I want to talk to you now. To her. To me. To every girl who grew up between these hills thinking she was the punchline of a joke she didn't write.

Listen.

You are not the story they told about this place.

You are the place.

You are the fog that pours over the ridge at dawn. You are the wildfire and the rain that comes after. You are the coyote song at 2 a.m. and the stubborn poppies pushing up through cracked earth in April. This land is not soft. This land is fierce. It burns and it comes back greener. And you came up out of it.

So why did we ever believe we were small?

Here's what I'm releasing.

I'm releasing the performance.
The relentless, exhausting audition for a role I never even auditioned for.

I'm releasing the idea that being from here means being for sale. That my worth lives on the surface. That the best thing about me is how little I take up.

I'm releasing the comparison.
The measuring.
The way I checked every other girl's outfit and body and boyfriend like they were a scoreboard I was losing.

I'm releasing the story that we're catty. That we're competition. That there's only room for one golden girl and the rest of us fight for scraps. That's a lie designed to keep us small and separate. I'm not buying it anymore.

Let it go.
Let it burn.
Let it be ash that feeds the next thing.

Because here's the truth I found underneath the mask.

We are bigger than this.

The women of Agoura Hills are not a trope. We are soul walking around in sundresses. We are depth disguised as ease. We are the artist and the athlete and the healer and the mother and the girl who's going to leave and build something you can't imagine yet.

I've seen us. I've seen the girl everyone called shallow stay up all night with a friend who wanted to disappear. I've seen the "pretty one" turn out to be the smartest person in the room. I've seen us grieve and rise and hold each other in ways that would break your little story wide open.

We contain multitudes.
We always did.

So who's that chick?

She's not who you thought.

She's the one who took off the mask and found her whole face still there — softer, realer, holy. She's the one who stopped shrinking. She's the one who loves this town and refuses to be reduced by it.

She's expansive. She's soulful. She's on fire and she's not asking permission.

She's me.

She's you.

She's every girl who ever drove these canyon roads feeling too much and hiding it well.

Stop hiding it, love.

Let them wonder who that chick is.

We already know.

We're bigger than they ever told us.

And we're just getting started.

-Ryder, GG Collective

Epilogue: She was the wildfire before they gave her a name. She was the glow on the horizon, the kind that makes you roll the windows down and drive slow. She was the echo in the canyon, carried by the wind and catching in your throat with no warning. Who's that chick? They said it about her before she even learned to say me. That girl, the Agoura girl. But their story was too small for her expanse.

She grew up believing it, though. Believing she was a shadow thrown by someone else's spotlight. Believing that her beauty was armor, her silence survival, her power only visible through the lens of approval. She perfected the art of being everyone’s "yes," skating smoothly beneath expectations, while her real self shouted against the mountains, unheeded and unresolved.

But the hills—they hold secrets, and so does she. The kind of secrets you can only hear in stillness. The rustle of the oaks, the rhythm of her own unapologetic heartbeat. A voice that whispers, You are not what they call you. You are not the mask they molded. You are not borrowed light—you are the sun in its own rising.

She has released the story that told her to shrink. She has burned that story down, letting the ash mingle with the earth that taught her how to bend and grow. She is hungry again—hungry for connection, for truth, for building a life so expansive it disrupts their narrative. She knows now that she is not competition with the other women of this town; she is kin to them. They are not opponents. They are allies. They are wildfire and rain, doubt and boldness. They are instinct, intuition, and strength wearing bare feet on rocky trails.

And now? She’s unstoppable. She is the girl who took back her name. The one who doesn’t ask for permission to be the raging, sacred storm she was born to be. She walks lighter now—not because she's less, but because she's left the weight of expectation behind.

They’ll still ask, “Who’s that chick?” But now, the answer is different. Now, the answer is hers.

“She is,” it says.
And that’s enough.

Mitchell Abbott 9/7/26 Mitchell Abbott 9/7/26

WE'RE HERE TO RIDE, NOT TO ARRIVE

Throwbacks submitted to Gospel Glamour, all captured on disposable drugstore cameras and soundtracked by "We Got Love" feat. Ms. Lauryn Hill by Teyana Taylor.

Nothing's changed.

And I need you to hear me when I say that — really hear me, the way you hear a thing in your chest before your head catches up. Nothing's changed. And that, my loves, is exactly why we're here. Right where we are. Not lost. Not late. Not behind. Here.

I was on a subway car the other day. New York. That old rattle, that lean and sway, that smell of steel and something you can't name. And I looked up and I saw her. A girl with a yoga mat slung across her back like a quiver of arrows. Combat boots. A vintage tee gone soft from a hundred washes. And I swear to you, I have been that girl. You have been that girl. We are all, still, that girl.

Twenty years ago she was on that same car. Same lean, same sway. Blonde hair loose, a tote bag full of everything she thought she needed. And she's still riding. Still searching. Still arriving. Because that's the secret nobody tells you — you don't graduate from the seeking. You just get more honest about it.

The subway car is the truth. Do you feel that? We keep climbing on. New York to California and back again. Underground in Manhattan, then somewhere in the golden light of the West with the windows down. Different coast, same ride. Same woman, holding her mat, holding her breath, holding herself together with a leather strap and a prayer.

And love is the new money.
Say it with me.
Love is the new money, love is the new community.

We used to chase the other kind. Oh, we chased it. We stacked it, counted it, wore it, apologized for wanting it and wanted it anyway. But something cracked open in us. Something in the collective body of us girls said — enough. The currency changed. The exchange rate flipped. And now the richest woman in the room is the one who can hold another woman's face in her hands and say, I see you, keep going.

Nothing's changed. We're still walking these streets with our mats and our tattoos and our band tees. Still ducking into the hot yoga room where the air is thick as a womb, where we sweat out the lies, where we fold and unfold and fold again. That room is a church. Don't let anyone tell you it isn't. The mirror is an altar. The mat is a pew. And when the teacher says surrender, half of us are weeping and we don't even know why.

And then Sunday comes. And some of us go to the pews with the wood and the light through colored glass, and some of us go to the ocean, and some of us go nowhere at all but the kitchen floor. And it finds us anyway. That thing. That presence. That Holy Spirit that doesn't care about your zip code or your outfit or your résumé.

I have been on my knees. On the actual ground. Face wet, mascara gone, undone in the most complete and beautiful way. Captured. That's the only word for it. Captured by something bigger. And I looked up through the blur and there were hands reaching for me. Women's hands. Us girls. Because we don't let each other fall alone anymore. That's the new economy. That's the new wealth.

Love is the new money. Love is the new community.

Use us. I mean it. Use us the way you'd use a bridge, a lifeline, a rope thrown across the dark. We are here to be used, to be leaned on, to be spent freely between women who understand. Lingo us — talk to us in the language we invented in the back of the subway car, in the whisper before the pose, in the pew, on the kitchen floor. That secret dialect of the seeking. That mother tongue of the almost-arrived.

Because here's what I've learned riding these cars all these years. The destination was never real. The arriving is the lie we tell to keep our feet moving. What's real is the ride. What's real is the woman beside me with her mat and her tote and her tired, holy eyes. What's real is that we keep climbing back on. Again. And again. And again.

Nothing's changed. The graffiti's still on the wall. The date stamp still says we were young once and we still are. The train still leans and sways. And we are still here — still searching, still sweating, still crying on the floor, still catching each other by the wrists before we hit the ground.

And maybe that's the whole thing. Maybe that's the sermon and the confession and the battle cry all rolled into one.

We're not here to fix it. We're here to hold it.

We're not here to arrive. We're here to ride together.

So climb back on, my love. Take your seat next to me. Bring your mat, bring your grief, bring your whole undone self. There's room. There's always room.

Because love is the new money.

Love is the new community.

And nothing's changed — thank God, thank everything — nothing's changed.

That's exactly why we're here.

-Ryder, MR, GG Collective

Epilogue: Love is the economy of the eternal. It isn’t made to be hoarded or withheld; it is meant to be spent and shared until the ledger of the heart is full beyond reckoning. Nothing about the core of this has shifted. Beneath the rush of modernizing, optimizing, and arriving, the foundation remains unmoved. Love is still the undeniable currency of connection, the wealth that we can’t measure in zeros but instead in the quiet moments of being seen, in the steady grace of showing up. And through these loops—yesterday's mat, today’s train, tomorrow's tide—we are reminded that the seeking itself is sacred. This isn't about the finish line or a grand conclusion. It’s about the breath in the sweat lodge of a yoga room, the clasp of hands in a subway sway, or the old scar-red stories whispered across a late-night floor.

Nothing's changed. The leaning in, the letting go, the catching each other over and over again—it’s the same. It’s a story of us, the collective body of women who say to each other, "I see you. Keep going." That’s the unspeakable beauty of sharing this ride, this truth stitched in the universe since the beginning, unbroken and whole. It’s the pulse of love running through Sunday’s stillness, New York’s chaos, and every quiet kitchen prayer. Nothing’s changed. It never had to.

Mitchell Abbott 9/4/26 Mitchell Abbott 9/4/26

THE DESERT WHISPERS IN SHADES OF VIOLET

The desert sighs, captured under Mitchell Royel's lens in the heart of the Fashion District, today, 9/4/26. It’s an unspoken love letter to Palm Springs—the shimmer of heat against sun-bleached skies, a mirage of nostalgia wrapped in violet dusk. Somewhere between the lines of history and dreamscape, we see her—a shadow and a light all at once, Marilyn Monroe, eternal in her glow. An icon etched in glamour and longing, her laughter ricochets through the haze like a secret never fully kept. We’re listening to *I Need Your Love* by Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding—it fills the silence like a heartbeat beneath a desert sky, the kind of song that drowns hearts in its rhythm. Marilyn dances in our imagination, wrapped in satin and mystery, a muse suspended in the winds of time, soft and untouchable, yet everywhere all at once. Like the desert, like Palm Springs, she becomes a place you carry within.

There's a particular kind of quiet that lives inside a hotel room in the desert. Not silence, exactly. More like a held breath. The air conditioner hums low, the curtains glow gold at the edges, and I'm sitting cross-legged on a bed that isn't mine, holding a phone that is.

Brand new.
Still smells like the inside of the box.

I keep thinking about that.
How something can be brand new and still hold all the old weight if you let it. So I don't let it.

Delete.

His words scroll up the screen — paragraphs, whole essays, the kind of messages that used to make me feel chosen. He was good with language. That was part of it. He could build a cathedral out of a text message and I'd move in, hang curtains, call it home. But a cathedral isn't the same as a life. I know that now. I'm learning it with my thumb, one long paragraph at a time.

Delete.
Delete.

We ended it clean. That's what everyone keeps saying, like it's a compliment. At least it was amicable. And it was. No slammed doors. No lies. Just two people who finally admitted, gently, that gentleness wasn't enough. Amicable doesn't mean it doesn't gut you, though. Amicable just means you have to feel it without anyone to blame. You have to sit with your own hands and say — this was me, too.

So here I am.
Clearing contacts.
Not out of spite.
Out of space.
Every name I let go makes the room inside me a little bigger, and I've been so cramped for so long I forgot I could stretch.

The drive out here did something to me.

Hours of highway. My dad's hand steady on the wheel, my little brother asleep against the window with his mouth open, the desert opening up on either side like the world just decided to exhale. Somewhere past the wind turbines — those great white giants turning slow against the mountains — I felt it. A fog I didn't even know I'd been living in started to lift.

I didn't cry. I just breathed. Really breathed. The kind that reaches the bottom of you.

And in that breath, things I'd been ignoring started to whisper.

The new job, for one. Part-time, nothing fancy, the kind of thing you take to pay for the life you're figuring out. But something about it feels different. I can't name it yet. It's like walking into a room and knowing someone left the window open — you can't see the air moving, but you feel it. That job is a window. I don't know what it's letting in yet. I just know it's letting something in.

There's a café back in the valley.
Crave.

I've been a handful of times. Sat in the corner. Watched the light move across the tables. And I remember thinking, both times, I could do something here. Not just drink coffee. Make things. Write things. Let the messy half-formed parts of me spill out onto a page where no one's grading them.

The people there — they hum on a frequency I recognize. Artists and dreamers and the beautifully unfinished. My people, maybe. I've spent so long shrinking myself to fit rooms that weren't built for me. What would it feel like to sit somewhere that was?

So I've decided. It's small and it's enormous. On my days off, I'm going to Crave. I'm going to sit in that corner and I'm going to create. Not for anyone. For the sheer animal joy of making a thing that didn't exist before I touched it.

And there's more. There's a hot yoga studio I can finally go to as much as I want — sweat pouring, mind emptying, my body remembering it belongs to me. There's a cycling studio too. A room full of movement and noise and the good kind of burning. I keep imagining myself in these places, over and over, until the imagining stops feeling like a wish and starts feeling like a plan.

This is what nobody tells you about the ending of things. That the space it leaves isn't just loss. It's room. Room for yoga and cycling and coffee-shop mornings. Room for a version of me I haven't met yet but already miss.

My brother's awake now.
Restless the way little boys get in hotel rooms.
So we go outside.

The evening is warm and violet. And there she is — the statue. Marilyn. Enormous, white, laughing, her skirt caught forever in that wind that isn't blowing anymore. My brother tips his head all the way back to look at her.

"Who's that?" he asks.

And I tell him.

I tell him she was one of the most famous women in the world. That millions of people loved her face, her voice, that laugh. That she could walk into a room and stop it cold. And I tell him the other part too, softly, the part he's too young to fully hold — that being loved by everyone isn't the same as being known. That she was lonely in the middle of all that light. That she was so much more than the picture the world kept taking of her, and hardly anybody ever bothered to look.

"That's sad," he says.

"Yeah," I say. "It is."

And standing there, my hand on his small shoulder, the desert cooling around us, something clicks so quietly I almost miss it.

Because I've spent a long time being someone else's picture. Building homes inside other people's cathedrals. Waiting to be chosen, be loved, be seen — from the outside in.

But I don't want to be adored and unknown. I want to know myself. From the inside. All the way down.

I look up at her one more time — frozen mid-laugh, mid-flight, mid-becoming. And I make her a small promise, though it's really for me.

I'm going to go home. I'm going to sit in that corner and make my things. I'm going to move my body until it feels like mine again. I'm going to walk into that new job and find out what the open window is letting in.

I'm going to look at myself the way nobody ever really looked at her.

My brother slips his hand into mine, and we walk back toward the golden light of the hotel, and I swear I can feel it — the woman I'm about to become, already waiting for me, already so glad I'm finally on my way.

-Ryder, MR, GG Collective

Epilogue: And now, we breathe. Together. We sit with everything that's still humming in the room—the bitter, the sweet, the ache, the relief—and we hold it all like water cupped in our hands. It slips between our fingers, yes, but what remains clings to the skin. These are the memories that stay—not to haunt but to shape. We see it now, don't we? The quiet knowing that some chapters of our lives don't close neatly. They sit open, edges curling in the breeze, living in the dissonance between what we wanted and what became. And maybe that's okay. Maybe this is where we grow.

We walk forward, not fully separate from what has been, but less bound by it. Less burdened. Memories wrap themselves around us like threads, not chains, and we learn to weave them into something that holds us without tying us down. It's not about erasing, because the past is as much ours as the future. It's about leaning in—into the cracks that once cut deep, into the spaces that opened too wide for us to fill at the time. But now, together, we fill them. With breath. With forgiveness. With the tender, blossoming hope that who we were does not have to decide who we will be.

There’s a kind of grace in this in-between, isn't there? A flutter of knowing that the woman we're becoming is waiting up ahead, smiling, arms stretched wide. She understands the bitterness we've tasted and the sweetness we've craved. She knows, as we do now, that we had to live all of it—every jagged, golden moment—to arrive here. We walk toward her, not as strangers but as pieces finding their way back into place. And she is ready. We are ready. For what comes next. Together. Always together.

Mitchell Abbott 9/1/26 Mitchell Abbott 9/1/26

BALDWIN HILLS MEETS MALIBU CHIC

Captured by Mitchell Royel in the Fashion District, where everything felt a little golden, a little slow, and a little too good to leave behind. There was this soft kind of heat in the air, the kind that makes every glance feel loaded and every frame feel like a memory before the night is even over. And now playing, *Hot & Sexy - Girls Trip* by Zara Larsson and Tyla, because it fits the mood exactly—pretty, bold, effortless, and just the right amount of dangerous.

There are days when inspiration politely taps you on the shoulder, and there are days when it practically pulls you out the door.

This was one of the second kind.

I had been staring at fabric swatches for a new dress line for what felt like forever. Soft cottons, slippery silks, tiny floral prints, clean solids, buttons that were almost right but not quite. Everything was pretty, but nothing was saying anything. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about designing dresses, it’s that “pretty” is only the beginning. A good dress should have a point of view. It should feel like somewhere you’ve been, someone you’ve met, or a version of yourself you’re just about ready to become.

So my girlfriend and I decided to leave our usual little world for the afternoon. We ventured out of my natural habitat with iced coffees, sunglasses, and a very open mind. Our destination was a dress shop in Baldwin Hills, partly because I had heard about it, and partly because the neighborhood had been lingering in my imagination after watching the show. There was something about the hills, the houses, the confidence, and the quiet glamour of it all that made me curious.

I wasn’t looking for anything too specific. Sometimes that is the best way to shop for inspiration. You go in without a checklist, and the day hands you exactly what you didn’t know you needed.

The dress shop was tucked into a sweet little stretch that felt lived-in and loved. Not overly polished. Not trying too hard. Just warm, colorful, and full of personality.

Inside, there were racks of dresses that immediately made me slow down. Cotton sundresses with easy movement. More structured pieces with sharp little waists. Prints that felt bright without being loud. A few pieces had that rare quality I always notice: they looked like they belonged to real women with real plans.

Brunch. A birthday dinner. A first date. A family party where you want to look effortless but secretly spent twenty minutes deciding on earrings.

Behind the register was a young woman in her twenties who looked like she had been styled by instinct. She had that calm, pretty confidence that doesn’t announce itself. Her hair was done, her makeup was soft, and she wore a dress from the shop in the most convincing way possible: like she wasn’t selling it, she was living in it.

A young man, also in his twenties, was moving around the store helping with things in that half-owner, half-boyfriend way. He adjusted a hanger, checked on a customer, answered a question, then drifted back toward the register to talk to her. There was a rhythm between them that made it feel like the shop was more than a business. It felt like a love story with inventory.

At one point, my girlfriend leaned in and whispered, “Do you think he bought it for her?”

I smiled because I had been wondering the same thing.

Maybe he bought it. Maybe he ran it for her. Maybe they built it together. Whatever the real answer was, there was something very sweet about watching two young people create a little world of their own and invite strangers into it.

We were holding two dresses each by then, pretending to be casual but very much invested, when the young man started talking about the neighborhood. He mentioned, almost in passing, that they lived in the three-story houses up the hill.

My girlfriend and I both paused.

Not dramatically. Not in a movie-scene way. More like two people who had just heard one sentence and suddenly had a million questions.

The three-story houses up the hill.

It was such a simple detail, but it opened a whole window in my mind. I wanted to ask about everything. What was it like growing up there? Did they always know they would stay? Did the shop come first or the house? Were they building something for themselves, for their families, for the neighborhood? Did people underestimate them? Did they enjoy proving people wrong, or was that exhausting?

Of course, I did not ask all of those questions, because curiosity still needs manners.

But I felt them.

There is a specific kind of pause that happens when you realize your assumptions have been walking a few steps ahead of you. You may not have invited them, but there they are, making themselves comfortable.

And that was the tiny lesson tucked inside the afternoon.

I have been thinking a lot about prejudice lately. Not in the loud, obvious way it usually gets discussed, but in the quiet way it can live underneath a thought before you even notice it.

Most people know how to control overt racism, or at least how to hide it. We know the right things to say in public. We know what sounds ugly. We know what crosses a line.

But prejudice is sneakier than that.

It can show up as surprise. It can sound like, “Oh, I didn’t expect that.” It can look like a pause after someone tells you where they live, what they own, who they love, or what they have built. It can sit quietly inside admiration, dressed up as curiosity.

That is the part that feels important to pay attention to.

Because if we are not careful, prejudice catches up to us in the small moments. Not always as cruelty. Sometimes as limitation. Sometimes as a story we wrote about someone before they had the chance to tell us the truth.

Standing in that dress shop, surrounded by pretty fabrics and afternoon light, I realized how easy it is to move through the world thinking you are open-minded while still carrying little folded-up assumptions in your pocket.

The goal is not to shame ourselves every time we notice one. The goal is to notice. To unfold it. To ask where it came from. To decide not to keep carrying it.

That afternoon reminded me that graciousness is not just how we speak to other people. It is also how honestly we examine ourselves.

I left the shop with two dresses I loved and one I probably did not need but absolutely could not leave behind.

One was soft and feminine, with a shape I kept thinking about for my own line. Another had a color combination I would not have chosen on a mood board, but in person it felt fresh and alive. The third had a neckline that made me rethink a sketch I had nearly abandoned earlier that week.

That is the beautiful thing about stepping outside your usual places. You stop designing from memory and start designing from experience.

I came home with notes in my phone, photos of details I wanted to remember, and that happy little feeling that comes after finding inspiration in an unexpected corner of the day. But more than that, I came home with a reminder that style is never just about clothes.

It is about who gets seen.

It is about who gets underestimated.

It is about the stories we tell ourselves before we know better, and the grace we give ourselves when we finally do.

My girlfriend and I talked about it on the drive home. The dresses. The couple. The houses up the hill. The way the shop felt like ambition and affection stitched together. We both agreed that the afternoon had given us much more than shopping bags.

It gave us a small but lasting shift in perspective.

And honestly, those are the best kinds of outings. The ones that begin with a search for fabric and end with a better understanding of people.

So yes, I found inspiration for the dress line. I found new shapes, new colors, and a new sense of ease I want to bring into the collection. But I also found a reminder to keep looking closer, listening longer, and letting the world surprise me without turning that surprise into a judgment.

We left with new dresses, lots of inspiration, and a subtle but profound lesson.

See you soon, Baldwin Hills.

—Ryder, Mitchell Royel