EPB Style Lab No. 1: Matriarchal Weather Systems

Welcome to the Style Lab. This is where I test combinations—not just of clothes, but of time, tone, and threshold.

Today’s subject: incongruous weather dressing.

Not because it’s chic. Because it’s sovereign. I was trying to format the next collage for the 2026 EPB calendar. But something snagged—technically and psychically. Instead of finishing the grid, I kept spiraling into the images. The weather outside was grey, wet. My outfit was…wrong. Or right, depending on your cosmology.

I thrifted this micro suede romper to be easy. Pull it on, pull it off. But it started to feel like a child’s solution—like I’d dressed for a mood I didn’t believe in anymore. So I sharpened it. I gave it thorns, boots, a red mouth, and a center of gravity. The girl is gone. I kept the garment. I just made it answer to a new name. Maybe this is Month 0. Maybe this is how the calendar begins—not with dates, but with deviations.

This collage is a forecast. Salt, pearls, Pompadour. KISS with a cat. Meat and vinyl and protest. This is what happens when aesthetic labor becomes climate critique. PATRIARCHY = CLIMATE EMERGENCY isn’t a slogan. It’s a system report.

Inside the EPB Style Lab, dress becomes data, and collage becomes forecast. Not because beauty saves us, but because aesthetic refusal names the crisis. Season, silhouette, spectacle—all are tools. And in 2025, we use them to map a different atmosphere. Unstable. Matriarchal. Ours.

The calendar will return. With moons, looks, and moods. But today, the Lab spoke first.