How to Lose Your Name
Cheval spent her entire life trying to be a wedding dress designer (she started sewing at 7 years old and studied fashion design in college). In her mid 20’s, she got her big break when a large fashion house hired her to design a wedding dress collection named after herself. But that dream only lasted eight years. She found herself in the middle of a legal battle that would take away her collection, her job as a designer, and eventually her name.
—
Support our new independent production (and get bonus content galore!) by joining TTFA Premium. We now offer tiers as low as $4.99 / month. Sign up.
Our email subscribers get first dibs on ticket sales, new merch, show announcements and more. Join our mailing list here.
You can catch up with TTFA on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook using @ttfapodcast. Nora's Instagram is @noraborealis.
—
Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.
When you meet a person, it’s normal to introduce yourself. To say, hi, hello, I’m Nora McInerny. Well, you say your name. Unless your name IS Nora McInerny -- I know there is another one of us out there, we used to be Facebook friends.
But that’s what we do. We meet a stranger, we say hello and we tell them our name.
But for today’s guest, it’s not that simple.
Nora: Okay, so first things first. Can you introduce yourself to me?
Cheval: I'm Cheval. I was formerly a wedding dress designer, but I cannot use my own birth name anymore in any business or commerce or even to publicly identify myself. So Cheval is the name.
Cheval has to choose her words carefully, because her birth name doesn’t belong to her anymore. And saying it, on this podcast, or anywhere else publically could get her in legal trouble.
Which is fully a bananas thing to say. It’s not really something any of us have heard of before- but legally, using her name in public could get her sued.
So… how do you lose your name?
Well first, you make a name for yourself:
Fashion Week: “Welcome to New York Fashion Week, we just arrived at the venue. We are setting up , we are very excited. 12 months of blood, sweat and sparkle tears goes into 15 minutes of fabulous...[music starts]”
Like Cheval said, up until two years ago she was a wedding dress designer. And a really popular one. Some of you might recognize her birth name, which was also the name of her dress collection.
Fashion Week: “I’m Hayley Paige, and you’ve seen my gowns on Instagram, Pinterest, or if you’ve been to a wedding in the last 10 years.”
[fade under narration] “I’ve been with JLM couture since 2011, so Hayley Paige is six years old…”
From 2011 until 2020, Cheval was this super star in the wedding dress industry. She showed her gowns at New York Fashion week. Celebrities like Amy Schumer and Crissy Tiegan wore her dresses. And, she made regular appearances on the TLC show Say Yes to the Dress.
SYTTD On this season of Say Yes To The Dress..] [fade]
If you haven’t seen it, it’s a reality show about wedding dress shopping. In each episode, a bride travels to Kleinfeld Bridal in New York to buy her perfect wedding dress.
And a lot of brides on the show know what they want before they get to Kleinfeld. They’ve done research on styles, fits, and…designers.
SYTTD: There is this one dress. Hailey Paige makes this dress called the Hailey gown. It’s absolutely stunning, it’s breathtaking. I did a hunt down all over Long Island to find it, nobody had it. One day I said ‘let me message’ Hailey Paige on Instagram because she’s going to write back to me. She wrote back to me. She said try Kleinfield’s so that’s why I’m here today.
Like…. She was so popular among the brides who came on this show, that Say Yes to the Dress started having her make cameos.
SYTTD Hayley yelling “surprise” and bride freaking out.
“Oh my god this is Hailey Paige!”
“Hailey Paige is in the dressing room right now. I follow her on social media and saw she was in Hawaii like yesterday.”
[music]
And outside of the show…Cheval had one million followers to her Instagram account- at miss hailey paige. A lot of those followers were brides, who loved her dresses. Others were women who weren’t even in relationships but hoped that one day they would wear one of her gowns to their wedding. And like we heard in the clip from the show, she engaged with them. Her job was not just about designing dresses…she loved connecting with the brides who wore them and seeing how the designs made them feel.
[music fade]
So… how did Cheval go from one of the most well known names in her industry, to losing her name? That’s a complicated legal tale…that begins with a little girl who loved to play dress up.
[whimsical music]
Cheval: My grandmother taught me to sew at a very young age and I was exposed to a lot of creative elements and media, and I always gravitated toward clothing, specifically dress wear from the earliest I can possibly recall a memory, I think.
And I was a gymnast, so I loved like, leotards and velvet and sparkle scrunchies and, you know, Disney princesses and all those playful elements that just kind of stuck with me in an imaginative sort of way, and especially as I developed into being a creator and a designer.
Not only was Cheval drawn to sewing, she was throwing herself into it as a little kid.
Cheval: The first dress I actually consider made was an upcycle from an eighties, a hot pink eighties dress my mom had in her closet. And I reconstructed it, redid it, threw it on. It was like a hot pink mini dress with, like, these lace applicators on the straps. And I was like, seven. I was young. And so I definitely was just picking it up right away. Like, dresswear, you know.
As she got older, and her sewing skills got better, she started producing garments from scratch. She made dresses for herself. She made dresses for friends. And the type of dress she liked designing and sewing was becoming very clear:
Cheval: And it's funny because all garments I was making for myself, it was always with this element of it feeling like a wedding dress, you know, like my my graduation dress looked like a wedding dress.
So growing up, I just felt like I have something that I can say here that feels unique to me, but it's appreciated by someone else. And I got a good little sense of confidence in creating. I felt very much like I could be myself and that I didn't have to try so hard. But I think that natural feeling of I have purpose here, I have a real gift, not in like an entitled sense. It's just this is, this is where I feel most myself.
So by the time she’s thinking about where to go to college and what to study, she recognizes that her gift with dress designing could be part of her college experience.
Cornell had a great fashion design program she was excited about, but she also had a back up plan.
Cheval: I would say I had a very eclectic approach to to learning design and those skills because I dabbled in pre-med. My dad, being a general surgeon growing up, I loved science and math. And so at Cornell, I kind of had this creative approach to the curriculum where I was doing fiber science so I could take a lot of those premed courses just in case, you know, that was almost like my back up. Like that was a way you know, I just was like, let's just do this very thoughtfully.
Quick aside- Imagine how talented you have to be to have this kind of confidence where you love your art so much and feel so secure in it that being a DOCTOR is your back up plan. Anyway, Cheval is at Cornell, dabbling in pre-med but also taking lots of design classes.
Cheval: Being in these intensive studio classes and learning the history of design and pattern making, sewing, portfolio, entrepreneurship, like all that kind of stuff, It just very much excited me. And I found myself wanting to do extra work, wanting to learn more, Finding myself through Through the curriculum. And I had some really, really just amazing professors that challenged me, but also helped me get faith in the process that I could make this a viable profession. And I was always sketching. I was always just designing in the sense of we had our set classes, but then we also had this bonus student led design league that wasn't part of the curriculum, so it was all work on top of it. So I was making full collections for that. You know, I definitely feel like I discovered who I was a little bit more as a creator in my educational experience, which not everyone gets. I think a lot of times you you pull the most from your experiences, but on a technical and skill level, I learned so much there.
While she’s learning more and more about her craft, she’s also discovering a lot about herself and her style as a designer. One of the very clear takeaways for her was that her gift wasn’t just fashion design- designing wedding dresses was what she felt called to do.
Cheval: Like, nothing really trumped that for me. In the sense of. What's bigger than that? Like, I just was very set and focused. it really is a privilege to know what you want to do with with your life and what you feel like is your gift.
A lot of it for me comes back to this sentimental attachment through design. I take things very emotionally as I create, and I think that does lend itself to a really special connection, which is why I did choose to go into an industry that is, it revolves around an emotional purchase and a an experience that has a lot of heightened taxed energy in a very loving way. And so I loved creating for that because there's this follow through and like a different form of appreciation. So I really relied on that. It didn't feel like something that was just a product for products sake.
As her college experience is coming to an end, Cheval knows she wants to work in fashion. And she gets her first job almost immediately.
Cheval: I had a designer that was sitting in the audience at our big end of the year school fashion show, and she literally offered me a job after seeing my collection. And I felt so privileged in that moment because I was like, Wow, she was here. She saw my moment, she appreciated it. She offered me a job. And it was just a great story, of course. So I did go and work for her for about six months, but it was a high fashion house.
At the high fashion house, she learned how to work in a sample room and saw professional designers up close. But after six months, she got an opportunity to work on the design team at Priscilla of Boston, a huge bridal brand.
Cheval loved that job. Working in the wedding dress industry was exactly what she hoped it would be. She got to see these elegant once in a lifetime garments be created, and she had a hand in that! The only downside of the job was that all the sewing and manufacturing was done overseas.
Cheval: And I kind of missed, you know, working in a sample room and having a little more of a hands-on experience. And I was doing my own industry research and really just paying attention to who– who's name kept coming up in the industry.
Once she identifies the leaders in her industry, one company stuck out as a place she wanted to work. We’re not going to say it because of all this legal drama but feel free to google it!
Cheval: So I actually went after them in the sense of I approached them and reached out to somebody there. I didn't actually get offered an interview even for almost a year.
And when they finally invite her in to talk, they see something in her. So far in her career, she’s been on design teams, helping bring another designer's idea to fruition. But in that meeting with the company, they started talking about making her a head designer.
Cheval: A head designer essentially is the lead visionary of a collection. And in my former case, you know, it was specifically for bridal gowns. And I remember just at the time that I saw that as the big role for me, you know, as the dream job when I was a kid. Like, I always wanted to be a wedding dress designer. That was my big dream.
And… she got the offer.
We’ll hear more about the dream job when we come back.
MIDROLL
We’re back.
It’s 2011, Cheval is 25 years old, and has just been offered a job as a head designer at her dream company. She’s going to design wedding dresses for her own collection, which they are going to name after her.
2011 is also the same year she hears about a new social media app: Instagram.
Cheval: At the time, I did not know what Instagram was and when I was told by a best friend, you know, Oh, there's this new photo editing app, and that's what she explained it us. It's a photo editing app. You upload photos of your life similar to Facebook, but it's a little more visual and she's like, You're so, you know, artistic, You'd be great at this, like, get on it, you know? And so of course, I was like, Oh, I'll see what this is about, you know? And I opened my account similar to how most people do, using my birth date and my name. And at the time, actually, the handle name I wanted to use was just my first and middle name was already taken. So I went with Ms. in front because that's a term of endearment. My mother, you know, whenever I'm in trouble or if I if she sings me, you know, she puts the miss in front. Little Miss Sunshine kind of thing, you know.
I just want to remind us all what Instagram was like back in those early years. We were uploading photos of……mundane stuff like a muffin from the coffee shop or a badly lit photo of our friends that we put a very grainy filter on. It wasn’t being used as a marketing tool yet.
And when Cheval’s offered this dream job as a head designer at the bridal company, social media is never mentioned in the contract. What her contract does say is that since the collection is named after her, her name will be trademarked to the company.
Cheval: I definitely understood that with such a large position at a company that there would be a contract. And, you know, to this day, I still understand and feel that it was reasonable that I would have to give the right for my name to be trademarked so that it could be used for the bridal collection I was designing, as a form of protection. And, I also just felt the sense of urgency and pressure to not be combative and want to…I was so focused on my ability and what I felt like I could do for the company that, you know, that unique form of just showing up in a room and being a hard working, ready to go type of person was more important than than anything else. [ominous music]
Cheval: This is something I've bonded with so many women over and why I do feel comfortable sharing it because it's not something I feel shame with. But being a people pleaser and wanting to be a team player can a lot of times work against you, you know? And in a general sense, when you feel like let's let's go all out and let's make this amazing, You know, you want to have that attitude. And I definitely don't feel like I ever did well with with confrontation and knowing how to say something without, you know, I don't want to offend anyone. I don't want to seem difficult...
She doesn’t want to seem difficult! She wants to be a team player!
Yes, she is now in charge of her own collection, but you can hear that she is still thinking of the work as teamwork. She said “LET’S make this amazing.” Let us. She looked at this new job as a collaboration: she would design wedding dresses, and the company would provide the overhead so she could focus on the creative part.
And right now I can only assume there are thousands of women listening to this podcast nodding as we all remember a time when we decided to be the team player, to not be difficult, to not seem too invested in our own self-interest.
ChevaI: I was 25, but I had zero experience in real negotiating or any type of contract law. And I did not have a lawyer look at the contract.
So, Cheval signs the employment contract, and gets to work.
For 8 years, she works for this company designing collections that she was proud of, and that were loved by brides. Her dresses are girly, they are sparkly, they are whimsical- they are everything she’s wanted to put out into the world as a designer.
And brides don’t just love her dresses, they love her. Whether people found her on Pinterest when they were researching dresses, or through her Instagram, brides liked the designer behind these dresses they love. Cheval is their age, she’s bubbly, she’s funny, and this all helped her brand skyrocket.
This is when she starts appearing on Say Yes To the Dress. Her first wedding was even featured on the show.
And, her Instagram following is growing. And the way we’re using Instagram is changing. It’s becoming a way to build a personal brand, and in this case, the line between the person and the personal brand and the brand named for a person? It’s blurry at best.
Since she opened an account in 2011, she treated it like a personal page. She shared her work as a designer, but she also shared photos and videos of her friends and family. So even as her following grows to over a million people…
Cheval: I was speaking to my mother every day on my account.. What I considered my personal Instagram at the time. My fiancee and I met through the direct messages, best friends, people for years that have been just dear, dear friends that believed that was me. My account, my personal account at the time they were following me, the human being, they were not, you know, and for many of these people, they were not following a business account in their experience.
She was sharing photos of the dresses she designed or fashion shows she was at, but it just felt like she was sharing her life, because these posts were sandwiched in between vacation photos and photos of her loved ones.
So for eight years, she built her wedding gown brand. She’s appearing on TV and her Instagram following is huge.
Then, in 2019, she and her employer start negotiating a new employment contract because her old one was about to expire.
Cheval: So I know this is a little bit of a territory where I have to be extremely delicate. And what I can share is that when I started to negotiate. I felt like the big picture in me just wanted my next contract to accurately reflect the value and the contributions I was making to my former employer at the time. And the expectations were just very far apart. There was a massive delta, I feel, or that I at least experienced in what I felt like I had, you know, in a sense earned and performed and done versus what I was actually receiving. And it's always scary when you're that far away and what became even more scary is how what I have now witnessed and experienced in the legal world. How there could be such a miscalculation in what actually transpired and what my experience was, and that that's terrifying because it's like you want to be able to show up and be truthful and accurate.
We only know Cheval’s side of the story when it comes to the negotiations. We reached out to her former employer but didn’t hear back. This is what we do know: Cheval’s social media accounts were a point of contention in the new contract. While she viewed her accounts as personal pages, the company wanted more ownership of them. This is sticky because if you remember, the collection is named after her and the company trademarked that name.
In a statement to Page Six back in 2020, the company said they and Cheval disagreed over how much freedom she should have over her social media accounts. For example, because she had such a huge following she was starting to get brand deals to promote other products on her page. The company disagreed with this practice.
The two negotiate for more than a year. Then, on December 15, 2020, the company sued Cheval in federal court.
[ominous music]
The lawsuit mainly focuses on the social media accounts, saying the Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok accounts she started and maintained belong to the company, not just Cheval. In the lawsuit, the company claims it should be able to dictate the kinds of posts and content that can go on these pages.
Cheval: I was expecting to be treated and seen as a businesswoman, especially after my contributions over that almost eight year period. And I felt like the way I was being treated was not reflective of how vital I was to that organization.
On December 21, 2020, Cheval posted a video to YouTube. She can’t use her Instagram to communicate with fans because it is the thing at the center of this lawsuit.
YouTube: [Deep sigh] It is with a very heavy heart that I announce I am resigning as a designer. This decision comes on the heels of a year and a half long legal battle to negotiate a new contract with bridal design house JLM Couture.
One that has resulted in them suing me and convincing a court to grant them temporary control and access over my Instagram account as well as my TikTok and Pinterest. I am being very cautious about how I use my own name right now… (fade down)
Her name, and how she uses it, is another part of the lawsuit.
Cheval: What’s more, JLM is demanding the right to permanently use my name in the promotion of their products, even after we are no longer working together. And they’re trying to prevent me from using my own birth name in any business whatsoever indefinitely.
The judge grants the company a temporary restraining order that basically says Cheval can’t exclusively run these social media accounts any more.
Cheval: And I will never forget the feeling of when the TRO was granted and I had to turn over my passwords within a 24 hour period. When I saw a post go up on that account, I will never forget the visceral feeling like the shaking and the like the drip in your throat and you feel like you're going to vomit because it felt like such a misrepresentation it felt so inappropriate to me because so many people, that whole following did not know that it was no longer me behind it. And I couldn't reach them. You know, I couldn't post to it. I couldn't share that. I couldn't tell people. And to this day, I've never had that opportunity to actually address the community that I was with in the trenches for almost ten years, you know, at the time when I was comparing that to not being able to use my own birth name, the social media aspect of it was worse because it felt like such a big misrepresentation.
In an instant, a court took away Cheval’s access to her Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest accounts and the 1 point 1 million people she communicated with on those platforms. They let her keep other social media pages that used the same handle.
Up until this point, she is still an employee of the company. Her contract is valid until August 2022. But after the lawsuit was filed, she knew she didn’t want to stay with the company until then. The lawsuit, and everything happening behind the scenes with her employer was the final straw. In 2021, she resigns.
YouTube: The conduct of JLM and Mr. Murphy in my view felt controlling, manipulative, and bullying. There was an overreaching into my personal life and creative freedoms outside of bridal designs, that very much felt like a violation of my good faith. I do not wish to subscribe to their business ethics or the way they treat employees and others. I’ve decided I no longer wish to work for a company that does not align with the human qualities that I value and respect the most.
Resigning gave her freedom from the company and the CEO, but it also came with a lot of loss. Not only did she lose the right to her name, her social media accounts, and her collections, she lost part of her future.
Nora: You've been helping women find like that one of the most important piece of clothing that they'll ever own or wear, you've been creating like moments for people,you've been this indelible part of thousands of people's biggest day, possibly of their lives. Right. And then just. The ‘you’ of it is somehow erased, but it's still up there on the internet. This feels like an episode of Black Mirror.
Cheval: Yeah, it. Sorry. It still gets me sometimes. When I think about it. All right. I think my. It was my biggest fear because my biggest fear in life is disappointing people. And so. Hi. So sorry. So sorry. Yeah.
Nora: No one ever cries on our show, so I don't know what you are. Okay.
Cheval: It was the disappointment that I felt so many women might experience in all that I was going through. Yeah, I mean, it's sad and it's upsetting. Like the name, the social media, the, you know, my fiance, they're getting sued, so many things. But my biggest fear did happen. It was that I would not be able to deliver to the women, you know, and that these people that have put their magic moments in my hands, you know, and then all of a sudden I was not able to do that, but I had no choice in a way in my mind. And I thought about people I would be disappointing and then not being able to share with them what actually had happened or that the message would be interfered with so that to this day it still gets me because I feel like I am trying to make up for lost time, but at the same time I cannot actually do what I know I'm capable of because I've also been restricted and with a essentially a five year non-compete in which I cannot identify to the trade.
When Cheval resigned, she and her legal team were under the impression that when the employment agreement expired, she could change her name and start designing wedding dresses under the new name.
But that wasn’t the case.
Instead, she was told by the court she can’t identify with the trade that her former employer does. Which means she cannot design anything bridal…for the next 5 years. Not a dress. Not a gown. Not a bridesmaid’s dress. Not a veil. If it’s wedding-related…it’s off limits.
Cheval: It was my purpose. You know, this is my livelihood. It is something I have gone all in on. And now it's a five year provision. That was the most jarring and I kind of looked inside myself and I was like, okay, well, you've dealt with some things over the last couple years. This is the worst one, you know, and like, how are you going to move forward? You know, and you kind of talk to yourself in a way that's like. What are the voices in my head telling me? Because I need to find a way to move on with my life. Because up until now, I thought I had a way. I was running on hope and then it was crushed.
We’ll be right back.
MIDROLL
We’re back.
Before we recorded this, I assumed that would be the toughest thing about this situation: losing your name. The one your parents gave you, the one you grew up with and grew into, the one you built a name FOR. But for Cheval, the biggest blow…of all these big blows…is that she’s legally barred from designing wedding dresses for five years.
This was the thing she felt called to do since she was a child. It would be like Tom Brady not being allowed to play football because of a contract dispute. Was that a good analogy for all the football fans listening to this show? I’ll try again- It would be like…who else is good at something? It would be like Mister Rogers being banned from making emotionally intelligent children’s programming!
It is a very rare thing to be able to make a living from your passion and your talent, and creative people just want to create, and yes we also want to be able to make a decent living at it…but a lot of us are unprepared to be stuck in the cross hairs of creativity and capitalism.
I, too, have signed contracts without having a lawyer read them. You probably have, too. There are plenty of companies who own your ideas as a condition of your employment! Who own your words or your art because you made it on a laptop they gave you.
This story is about a wedding dress designer versus a large company. But it’s also the story of Taylor Swift, Prince, and a million other creative people with big and small names who found themselves tangled up in a mess they never envisioned when they set out to make things.
Creativity is big business, and the gross necessity of being a creative right now means that you also have to build a brand for yourself. A brand OUT of yourself. A brand is -- apologies to my branding friends who are passionate about it-- a collection of rules. Fonts, colors, words you do and do not say to describe what you do or do not make. But people are much more messy and complicated and alive.
One of the reasons this has been so frustrating, is there is not a lot of case law dealing with social media. It’s likely Cheval’s case is going to set some sort of precedent for future cases involving social media accounts and who owns them. But her situation, unfortunately, had to be a test case.
So what does that mean for creatives? For people who already have a hard time distinguishing where their work ends and they begin? I don’t know, but it feels really scary to me personally. And talking to Cheval, I was anxious and sweaty the entire time just hearing about what she went through, because I could imagine this happening to me or other writers I know.
Cheval: You almost think that you build up this tolerance, right? And it's like, okay, I'm good at handling bad news. I'm good at pivoting, I'm good at figuring out stuff, you know. And as good as you can be, at some point, it has to process you have to process it and register it. You can't just keep tolerating it. And so psychologically, for me, that's what I had to do. I had no choice because I got to a point where I felt like there could be a part where I would harm myself if I didn't find a real solution to my situation. And that was the the the big turning point for me was that I have to completely reinvent. You know, it is a new name, but it's a new trade. And how can I somehow take what I have learned educationally and experience wise? Where can I apply my skill set? Where can I, you know, take that love of wanting to make women feel great and pretty and whatever it may be strong and all these things. How can I do that and manifest it in a way moving forward now?
Creatives are called to create, and even within the constraints she’s given, with her original calling taken from her, she still wants to design. The backup plan she had in college was to be a doctor. But her backup plan now is…to find something else to create.
But first, she had to find a new name for her new venture.
[YouTube video]: It was a season of waiting. A state of unusual circumstance. Somewhere between the old and the new I felt borrowed and blue… FADE DOWN]
Cheval announced her new name in a YouTube video. In it, she and a horse are standing together in an open field. She’s wearing sparkly clothes, of course, and eventually, they start running together.
[Music of YT video:] “I’ve waited for this fresh new page to ink. A Glowing paracosm to paint be think. And So we run against the wind, for it is the best way to feel the fierceness in deciding our own direction and the pressing of those most threatened by our potential.”
[VIDEO FADE]
Cheval: So Cheval is the French word for horse and I, in a very simple phrase, just love the way it sounds. It feels like it's a strong word. It sounds amazing. It it just rolls off the tongue, you know? And I just, I loved it.
I've always identified with like the horse type kingdom, my love of horses right there, like fantasy world of like unicorns, and Pegasus and like all these things that just feel mystical and powerful and like magical run against the wind type things. I liked that it was this manifestation of, of taking my power and running with it, you know? you know, life serves you lemons and you can't make lemonade. So we're going to go out there and find a strawberry field.
Shoes like really came to me in such a nice package. And it did make me feel like I had a leg up in the sense of like this could be a fresh step, pun intended. And I just ran with it. You know, I was like, I'm going to do it. Because I can at least feel a sense of self there. that feeling of like, I can be myself here, even though I've felt like stripped of so much, I can still tap into some of those little things that are important to me in my language of a creative expression.
Cheval launched her shoe company, She Is Cheval, in October 2022. And guys, these shoes are fabulous.
There are six inch, rhinestone covered platform heels. There are pink feathers on stilettos. There is a pair of rhinestone cowgirl boots that are mostly clear and were inspired by Dolly Parton.
They are statement pieces. They are proof that Cheval was not just a wedding dress designer, she’s an artist no matter what she’s designing.
Cheval: Yes, it's scary. It is scary. But it does it does get better as hard as it is to say that like it does, actually. And and I learned to put it in a box and no longer afraid of it. I'm no longer afraid of litigation. And that's a wonderful thing to say. It's like, yeah, it's kind of consuming your worst, you know, like mentality. But it's also like, I have shoes to make, like I got things to do and I have women that friggin stood up for me. And I'm going to. Gosh. Be darned if I don't show up for that.
Cheval’s old wedding dress collection still exists at the old company. It’s still named after her birth name, but has a new head designer. Some days, that’s hard for her. But she knows her wedding gowns were more than just designs- they were her art. And the thing about art is that it lives on. Once it’s created, it’s no longer yours anyway. It lives out in the world. People react to it and decide what it means for them…songs, paintings, sculptures…even wedding dresses. What you make is always bigger than you.
Cheval: Nothing will change that amazing connection. And I still want you to go find your dream dress no matter what. But I would also say stronger for it, you know, and as emotional as it can be at times, and upsetting and like confusing, Stronger for it. You know, and and it really will be a more beautiful next chapter because as a creative, I've always felt your best work is always your next work.
And…for the love of GOD…get a lawyer.
THEME MUSIC
CREDITS
Marcel Malekebu, Jordan Turgeon, Megan Palmer, Claire McInerny, Larissa Witcher, Eugene Kidd
You can find Cheval on her new instagram account AT all that glitters on the gram. And you can see her new shoe line at she is cheval dot com.