Journal / Gilasi
The manual made from the pieces.
The story behind KOJ Designs’ Gilasi language: broken stained glass, reconstructed beauty, and garments that turn fragments into presence.
GILASI / Beauty in the Pieces
There was never a manual, so she made one from the pieces.
In Yoruba, Gilasi means glass. But this collection is not only about glass. It is about what happens after the breaking.
Glass breaks into fragments that seem impossible to place again: sharp edges, uneven shapes, pieces of something that once felt whole. Gilasi begins at that point of fracture and asks what beauty can look like when the pieces are gathered instead of hidden.
The collection is inspired by broken stained glass. Each silhouette, outline, ribbon, and transparent surface carries the feeling of fragments being rebuilt into a new picture. The lines tracing the garments are not imperfections. They are the places where something changed, healed, and became visible.
Mrs. Morounkeji Samuel describes the work as coming from the life manual she never received: the process of learning through mistakes, endings, starting over, and discovering that the point was not always to have every answer, but to create a new one from what remained.
Broken. Gathered. Reimagined. Whole.
Through sculptural silhouettes, fragmented forms, transparency, texture, and color-blocked construction, Gilasi turns vulnerability into strength. It challenges the idea that perfection means being untouched.
Perhaps wholeness was never about having every piece untouched. Perhaps wholeness is about gathering every piece and choosing to make something beautiful with them.
2022 / New York Summer Fashion Explosion
The construction language begins.
Presented in Chelsea, NYC, the 2022 New York Summer Fashion Explosion chapter shows KOJ’s early mosaic approach: panels of saturated color, clean runway lines, and draped garments that already point toward the brand’s later sculptural identity.
The CTFashionMag feature described KOJ’s use of fabric to create mosaic color blocking, which remains one of the house’s clearest visual codes.
2024 / New York Fashion Week
Volume, memory, and movement.
KOJ Designs brought a tactile runway language to New York Fashion Week 2024: dimensional florals, exposed photo panels, ribboned body lines, metallic movement, and pieces that read as both garment and object.
The collection keeps the house codes visible. Bold color, sculpted shoulder work, and hand-built surfaces are treated as structure first, ornament second.
2024 / Red Torii Corridor
The corridor before the runway.
The red torii gate photographs are treated as their own NYFW 2024 chapter: saturated, theatrical, and architectural enough to stand apart from the runway documentation.
Studio / Summer / 2025
The edit.
Each image is treated like a blog entry: a scene, a garment detail, and a timestamp in the larger collection story.
