Christina Costanzo

Collection

“Far away from the land where I was born, intense nostalgia invades my mind. Here I am alone and sad like a leaf on the wind, I wanna cry I wanna die. I feel so much for my home. Oh land of the sun I’m sighing to see you, now I’m far away I live without light, without love. Here I am alone and sad like a leaf on the wind, I wanna cry I wanna die. I feel so much for my home.” -Harry Dean Stanton, Cancion Mixteca

Bio

Seeing making as the “working out of things,” Christina Costanzo uses craft as a way to explore her own perspective. Valuing research and making connections, she finds that the most important part of art is the journey of process. Christina approaches fashion as a form of anthropology, where garments hold meaning, memory, and connection. Especially interested in history, costume, craft, and storytelling, her process is rooted in research and emotional inquiry. Her designs are intimate, layered with narrative, and crafted to feel like artifacts of both personal and collective experience.

“SOMEONE IS IN MY HOUSE” originates from the question, “What is self when home no longer exists?”

After losing her family’s home in the California Wildfires, this question no longer presented itself as just a metaphor, but a reality. This collection is an attempt of preservation.

In grieving childhood and not recognizing herself as an adult, Christina looked to her child self for answers. She found herself trapped by nostalgia, realizing that “home” is an illusion of stability, but still she was not able to let go. And yet clinging onto something in an attempt to preserve it is the very thing that kills.

Drawing from direct childhood memories, this collection acts as an inbetween of fantasy and “reality,” of child and adult, of body and spirit. Using manipulation techniques that change, alter, and piece together the “self” fabric, Christina explores what it is to be many things.

To Christina, making is more than design, it's how we process the world. Each piece is a conversation between past and present, between grief and growth. Through this collection and all her work, she hopes to not only honor what was lost, but to build something enduring and meaningful from it.