The brief said Palais Royal. It meant: dress someone for a party at a chateau where the royal family used to do things they never wrote down.I didn't think about the king.

I thought about the one who shouldn't have been in the room — who got in by looking exactly like someone who belonged there. Who smiled the right way. Who knew which fork to use. Who was, underneath the dress, something they had no category for.That was the collection.

Not the succubus of folklore. The one who has learned, very precisely, how to pass.I bought chain by the meter from a market near Barbès. I cut it on the kitchen table. I sourced the crosses from a religious supply shop near Saint-Sulpice — they didn't ask what I was planning to do with them. I wrapped them in chain and sewed them into the décolleté so they sat just below the throat.

A rosary you couldn't remove. A blessing you had to wear even when you didn't want to.Every piece was hand-sewn. The jewelry too. I made it all myself because I needed to know the weight of it. If it was going to press into someone's skin, I had to have felt it first.

Grace wore it like she had always owned the permission. Shot it with flash because flash doesn't flatter — it shows you exactly what is there, which is what we wanted.I didn't know, sitting in the changing room afterward with the last dress still on the hanger, that I had just built the first room of a house I hadn't named yet.That is what this page is. Not a portfolio entry. A confession, recognized too late.