For travelers to and fro…
Do not be afraid of what you return to, for you have changed in those moments, and nights away.
When I first met Dru Blumensheid, I had no idea we would one day create together. Some encounters arrive quietly, almost incidentally, before revealing themselves later as the beginning of something far more formative.
Mona was born from an alignment based less on planning than through recognition.
With fashion, I’ve always been interested less as a spectacle and more a language. Beyond hype, silhouettes, and colorways, style carries memory, tension, resistance, and actuality. A wardrobe tells stories before a wearer speaks. It exposes both fantasy and function; the practical and aspirational; who we are, and who we want to be.
This became crucial to my central ask in developing Mona, a fashion film that encourages one to examine tangible needs, movement, and what it means to be adrift; unmoored; the uneasy process of coming back changed to a place drastically different than when you left it.
When Dru first shared Mona’s framework, a few references stood out, the first being Mona’s emotional anchor: Agnes Varda’s Vagabond.
Like Varda’s portrait of the female outsider, Mona’s concern is with what happens at the edge of belonging, and the unstable emotional state where freedom and alienation begin to blend together.
Dru and I met with the team several times over three months to discuss the production in early 2025. Someplace in the third or fourth conversations were moments where I felt a creative kindling in what initially seemed disparate backgrounds(she’s lived abroad whereas I’d only been across America at the time). In our talks, I discovered a relative canon drawing from 90s and early 2000s fashion iconography, as well as a sort of fragrant desire to explore the structural identity of people and places emerged. This was exciting to pursue.
Drawing from documentary realism, surreal fragmentation, and poetic environmental imagery, the film exists in a hybrid state between observation and hallucination. For this, I was inspired by Peter Lindbergh’s candid physical honesty, that remains present but is guided by a more emotionally speculative terrain, one where the body is both observer and instrument. If Lindbergh captured the final vestiges of an unguarded photographic humanity, Mona asks what emotional truth looks like after digital saturation.
In working with Dru, I believe my team and I have learned more intimately the purpose of messaging and subtext. With Mona, our work becomes something larger than fashion cinema.
I love imagery from the 90s, very sensual and present – the final vestiges of humans unmitigated pre hyper performative – “digitally manipulated” society/media
The language of the 90s, becoming withdrawn from 80s oppression – freedom and voice were a huge proponent of content in the 90s, see Sex in the City, Living Single, Friends, Eyes Wide Shut
Adult exploration, while filled with its gregarious hollywood parties and political scandals, wasn’t something to hyper police post-911, but something to explore and learn from
Lindbergh’s photos continue into the modern era with the same level of care toward present and emotional honesty.
-Adrean’s musings on Lindburg
Dru’s garments themselves operate less as costume and more as adaptive systems — designed for transition, survival, and reconfiguration. Dru’s reversible outerwear and experimental material choices suggest a world where identity is no longer fixed, but continually negotiated through contact with shifting conditions. Fashion here becomes architecture for uncertainty.
The visual language strengthens this tension.
It is psychic. It is social. It is existential.
Alive.
Crew & Contributors
Director: Adrean Viaud
Producers: Dru Blemensheid (BUMESI), Adrean Viaud (AUBORD)
Writer: Dru Blumensheid
Creative Direction / Styling: BUMESI
1st AC: Hunter Dane
Second Unit: Natalie Hong
PA: Koby Kern
Styling, Makeup Artists: Dru Blumensheid
Cast
Model 1: City — Anna Wapman
Model 2: Seaside — Jia Pham
Model 3: Seaside — Dru Blumenshied
Location: San Francisco + Mendocino + Davenport, California
Soundtrack
- Ennio Morricone — Matto, caldo, soldi, morto…girotondo
Links
BUMESI — Films
BUMESI — Past Collections
BUMESI — About Dru
