Donja van der Stelt is a fashion designer, world-builder and behavioural designer, who creates wearable answers to existential questions. Drawing from her background in conceptual design, advertising and tailoring, she investigates how clothes shape perception, behaviour and the stories we tell ourselves. In a world ruled by logic, she believes magic still exists: not as something supernatural, but as humanity’s ability to imagine what does not yet exist.

However, that magic is under threat. Because we have created a world that thrives on the lack of it. As our need for escapism grows, consumerism thrives. Through algorithmically reinforced narratives, identities are projected onto us, with the silent promise that buying whatever will help us become that person, will fulfil us. But release never comes; instead of inspiring real change, fashion often traps us in a cycle of buying to never feel better.

Inspired by metaphysics, Donja began questioning whether garments could do more than broadcast identity. What if they could become a tool to change the world? Mythopoesis is a wearable language that guides the wearer towards imagining alternative realities. It reframes the garment as a behavioural intervention; rather than telling a story, it designs the conditions through which the wearer can write their own. Her collection, completely made from wool gauze, hand-painted with natural dyes to look like eroded rock, forms the first layer of grammar of what is soon to be a complete grammatical system. Because they aren’t clothes; they are verbs. And they invite the wearer to recognise themselves as the bridge between imagination and reality.

The veil-like fabric captures elements such as light, gravity and wind; a threshold between the seen and the unseen world, that returns the wearer to themselves, and redistributes authority of their intent. Every act begins as an unseen possibility before it enters the world, and by reframing garments as language, Mythopoesis encourages the wearer to pause while they dress, and ask: what if? Because if you misspell, you’ll literally tell yourself the wrong story.

Donja explores how fashion can become an active intervention alongside its narrative power. Her practice lives in the little crack between assumption and awareness: she is not interested in giving the instructions, she constructs worlds where existing patterns of thought and behaviour are disrupted, allowing new possibilities to emerge.