Inner Child Colors

I met Pina at an e-commerce event with a fashion and AI focus. In a room tuned to technology she was the one you saw first: the red hair, color worn head to toe like a signature. We fell into conversation about fashion and AI, and I understood quickly that the color was not just styling. It was psychology. This is the story of her first collection, The Inner Child.

I

The show

At a Chapel in New York, while the city's fashion week filled every calendar, Pina showed her Spring 2026 debut collection, The Inner Child. The room went dark. A Romanesque space, the audience dressed entirely in black, an unusual stillness settling over the seats. Above her name, among gothic floral patterns, a dimly lit painting of a child flickers with a golden halo. The feeling in the room was immediate: this would not be a traditional fashion presentation.

Two dancers find each other in pink tulle, playful, delighted, a world of their own for a moment. Fantasy and reality still intertwined. Suddenly, they were torn apart. One is left alone. Her movements turned fragmented and jerky, fighting something invisible, until she is taken down entirely in what reads as a startling act of violence, and folded into a fetal position at the center of the runway. A child suspended between life and death. Then, her body completely surrenders.

A delicate sound of a fairy melody fills the room. Small movements begin. Her chest rose again. She breathes. Life returns. Slowly, some unseen force pulls her upright, suspended between the child she was and the woman she is becoming. Her eyes open. She gasps. She awakens. Only then does she turn towards the runway and slowly walk.

The collection begins. Bright designs in playful, wearable shapes stroll down the runway, worn by models who move as though taken by the same trance.

Innocence, then a kind of trauma, consciousness, then rebirth. No one read that architecture aloud. It didn't need announcing. It was simply what the body did, and everyone watching understood it without being told. Afterward, one guest called the opening “an assassination of a pink ballerina in front of our toes,” a moment that “ignited a whole line of feelings.” Another guest, writing about it later on social media, voiced the question the whole show seemed to ask: “is our inner child good, bad, raw, damaged, innocent, free, stolen, or perhaps even killed?” No one in that room needed the question answered. They needed it to be asked.

No one watching was being told to return to childhood, only to remember what existed there: the ability to play, imagine, feel, and be present, before the world taught them to disconnect from it. Perhaps the inner child was never truly gone. Perhaps it was only ever waiting to be acknowledged.

II

The clothes

The tools she carried over from her hypnotherapy practice into the collection are simple: color, shapes and words. The word “play” takes center stage, because the inner child, as she defines it, “is a source of curiosity and discovery.” She integrated some of the aspects of the inner child that need attention in the adult self, such as adding the action of play, color and words of affirmation and awareness. Another apparel piece spells it straight across the back, pink against black: Is never the end of childhood, but the beginning of creative growth.

One garment says so much across the front without needing the rest of the line to explain it: Who deals with your emotions? Underneath, two small figures, one cross legged and calm, labeled Adult You. The other mid tantrum with fists in the air, labeled Inner Child. No caption resolves the question. It just sits there on your chest until you answer it yourself.

Elsewhere the same idea turns lighter. One top simply spells PLAY, each letter drawn in a different color and then embellished with sequin strokes which catch the light as it moves, worn with a sheer layer over a metallic silver skirt and bright green knee socks.

When asked about the hardest part of getting the theme from concept to runway, she does not talk about production. She talks about time. “This collection was a very exciting and fun craft. Collaboration and creation hand in hand, from concept to runway with stylist Moira, from Mona Style, made the process an effortless journey of reconnecting with pure play, curiosity, and authentic expression. But I kept desiring more time to play, and through this process of creating, I felt an artistic connection within that I intend to continue nurturing.”

III

Where it began

The designing came long before the therapy. “My passion for the arts and design began at a young age,” she says. “Realizing my level of engagement with paper dolls and doll clothes, my mother taught me how to hand sew, crochet and embroider with vivid colors as a child.” Vivid colors, her words. Color arrived as feeling first and name second, and it never left her. Decades after her fashion design degree, she would build a hypnotherapy practice around it, In Color Wellness. Today the practice and the label are not separate lives. Most designers begin with a silhouette, a fabric, a reference. Pina begins with topics and inner emotional patterns that are related to her practice:

IV

Still here

The work keeps widening past the wardrobe. This spring she added a third form: Tea Cult by Pina, a wellness gathering built around small, intimate tea tastings and conversation among like minded women. Clothes reach one person at a time. A table holds several.

Designer, hypnotherapist, host. The industry does not have a tidy shelf for that combination, and she seems unbothered, because the shelf was never the point.

That fashion line already happened once, on a runway, in a chapel, in September. In everything since, the collection opening, the practice, the table at Tea Cult, Pina is building more room for it to happen again. She is already at work with another New York Fashion Week collection taking shape behind the scenes. With her upcoming collection, In Bloom, she’s turning fashion into a quiet act of personal renewal.