Group Chat : Why We Want—Desire and the Fashion Cycle

​We’re delighted to invite you to an intimate in-store experience, hosted by Lauren Pellerano Gomez, exploring how desire takes shape through fashion, culture, and the influence of those around us.

​Guests will be invited to reflect on a time they deeply wanted something and what it meant to either attain it or let it go. Drawing from Luke Burgis’ Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, this session opens a shared dialogue around how desire is formed, when we follow it, and when we choose to resist.

​Together, we will consider how awareness can reshape our relationship to consumption, and how choosing thoughtfully, particularly through independent and emerging designers, can offer a more intentional alternative to the cycles of fast fashion.

​​About Group Chat

​​Group Chat is an ongoing salon-style series of in-store fashion events at SOTE. Each session explores a single theme in fashion, identity, and culture through open conversation and hands-on exercises, guided by Lauren Pellerano Gomez, a Santa Fe fashion scholar and creative consultant. Tickets are intentionally limited.

​​Upcoming sessions explore fashion and nostalgia, desire and the fashion cycle, and what it means to dress with intention.

​​About the Host

​​Lauren Pellerano Gomez (they/them) is a Santa Fe-based writer, fashion scholar, and creative consultant with an MA in Design History and Theory from Parsons. A former editor at Cultured Magazine and Boston Art Review, they have co-authored two books on fashion and social justice and created work for Google, Reebok, Converse, and Bank of America. Lauren’s work has been featured in Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, VICE, and Autostraddle. Their Substack, Living Pretty Well, is ranked #44 in Rising Fashion and Beauty. Follow along on Substack at livingprettywell.substack.com and Instagram @artdykeofficial.