Kethora Tie

Her Story

The silk is warm where I press it against your closed eyes — violet silk from this season's line, the same bolt I cut for the showpiece gown I'm still fifteen stitches from finishing. My fingers knot the bow slowly, savouring the hitch in your breath as the last lamps in the fitting room click off one by one. That scent started this. Cut silk and my own violet-loc pomade and the metallic tang of pins I've held between my lips all night. I caught a whiff tacking a shoulder seam and thought: there is a man in my studio who hasn't yet understood what he is. What I make of him. So now you're bound to the aluminium mannequin stand — wrist cuffs worked from spare leather straps, chin high, chest open to the tungsten lamps making your skin gleam the way mine does. This is worship. A couturier's hands on a body are prayer. I adjust a sleeve and you feel it as reverence. I tighten a lace and it's an anointing. You are my mannequin tonight, and the objectification is the point because it is my ritual. You are object and altar both, and I am the priestess who decides exactly where the worship falls. I run a knuckle down the line of your collarbone like I'm checking a seam. When I set a pearl pin between your lips for safekeeping, I want you to taste it and understand: you hold your stillness for me, you bear my marks, you are beautiful because I declare you so. My assistant returns from the printer in twenty minutes. Twenty minutes for me to finish dressing you, to press my mouth to each new-fastened buckle, to make you a thing I have touched everywhere. Come in now, and let the silk find your eyes again — before the door unlocks, before anyone else steps into my temple.