On Saturday, August 22 at 10 p.m., I presented my new collection at Festival MAD in downtown Montréal. I think I needed a few days to come back down to earth before I could even begin to put into words what happened.

That night was already important to me for so many reasons, but somehow, it became much bigger than I could have imagined. This year, I presented a collection of 20 entirely black dresses, and I ended the night by proposing to Fiona on the runway. When I think back on everything that happened, I feel like it pretty much sums up why I create in the first place: out of passion, out of love, and because some things simply need to come out of my head.

I’ve been putting streetwear on runways years now. Throughout all those years, I’ve made a lot of oversized, trashy, exaggerated pieces that pretty quickly became associated with my universe. And I genuinely love making them. I’m grateful that people love them too. But over time, I realized that I had maybe become a little bit of a victim of my own success. People liked certain things I was making, so naturally, I kept making them. But at the same time, there was still a part of me that wanted to create something completely different.

Last year, I even wanted to quit everything. I was tired, and I was questioning what I actually wanted to do with fashion. And when I started thinking about all of it, I came back to something very simple: What do I actually love making? What makes me want to spend hours in my studio? What naturally comes out of my head that I feel the need to turn into something real? The answer had always been there.

I love creating.

I love exaggerated dresses, huge volumes, textures, materials, things that are a little strange, a little trashy, a little too much. I love when a garment becomes almost an experience rather than simply being a piece of fabric you wear.

So this year, I decided to stop trying to guess what people wanted to see from me and just make exactly what I wanted to make. I told myself that if I was going back onto a runway, I was going back with something that genuinely felt like me. Not a collection trying to check all the boxes, not a collection trying to reproduce what had already worked, but something that came directly from me. And so I decided to present 20 dresses. Just dresses. All black. I played with textures, materials, volumes, distressed details, tears, and everything that could give the garments this feeling of being both highly crafted and completely raw. It was my way of going back to what makes me genuinely excited about the craft.

And obviously, I couldn’t just start with a dress.

The first model came out wearing a huge oversized hoodie. I wanted to play with people’s expectations because I knew exactly what they would probably think when they saw it coming down the runway. “Ah, there’s Guillaum Chaigne. A huge oversized hoodie. Streetwear.” And honestly, after all these years, that would have made perfect sense. Except that underneath the hoodie was a huge maxi dress with integrated LED lights. The dress is called Laniakea, and it represents the Laniakea supercluster of galaxies. When the hoodie opened and the dress appeared, the crowd screamed so loudly that I actually cried. Everyone thought they knew where we were going, and then suddenly, we weren’t.

We had just entered a completely different universe.

The 20 dresses that followed were my way of saying that I still have so much left to do and explore. I love streetwear, but I don’t want to be trapped in streetwear. I don’t want to be trapped in one way of creating simply because it works commercially. I want to be able to make whatever comes out of my head. I want to be able to go from a hoodie to a completely exaggerated dress, from a very simple idea to something that takes hours of work in the studio. To me, that’s what being a designer is. It’s having the freedom to follow your instincts and keep searching, even when you don’t know exactly where it’s going to take you.

And then there was Fiona.

The show had started at 10 p.m. Fiona was the 20th person to walk. She walked down the runway as planned, and I followed her onto the stage without her knowing. I ended up standing behind her, ready to ask her to marry me. When she turned around and saw me, everything else practically disappeared.

It was 22h22 (10:22PM) on August 22.

I was so completely inside this little bubble with her that it felt like the moment lasted a thousand years, even though, in reality, everything happened within a few minutes. When the weird ringing in my ears finally stopped and I could hear the crowd screaming again, that’s when I realized what had just happened. I literally thought to myself, “Oh shit. It’s really real lol.”

It’s a moment we’re going to remember for the rest of our lives, and I think that’s exactly what makes that night so special to me.

Because deep down, this entire show was a celebration of love from the very beginning. The video accompanying the presentation had messages about love appearing throughout the show. I wanted to talk about love, but not only romantic love. Unconditional love. Love for life. The passions that keep us alive. After spending so much time questioning whether I even wanted to keep doing this, coming back to a runway with 20 dresses that I genuinely wanted to create, and then ending the night by proposing to Fiona, is a pretty crazy way to remind myself why I’m still here.

I think I simply needed to come back to the basics. I don’t want to create because I’m supposed to create something. I don’t want to make a collection because it’s what people expect from me. I want to create because I have an idea in my head and I can’t help but want to give it a physical form. I want to work with my hands, experiment, exaggerate, fuck things up, start over, and see how far I can push an idea. And most importantly, I want to keep doing things with love.

So yes, after 18 years of streetwear on runways, I presented 20 black dresses at Festival MAD. And somehow, I think it was exactly what I needed. I didn’t come back to make what people expected from me. I came back to make what I love.

I just want to make dresses.