For Marci Davis, the creative force behind Moss D, designing clothes started with a desire to create something she’d want to wear—something comfortable, beautiful, and fun. For Davis, that look often means one of her colorful jumpsuits, a pair of boots, and braided pigtails.
While sitting cross-legged on the same couch that she uses for therapy sessions, Davis explains, “I hate clothes that touch me, so I made clothes that don’t.”
Davis studied transpersonal psychology at Naropa University and explains her designs using object relations theory, a school of thought that studies how the outside world builds the inside self. Davis very much includes the clothes you choose to wear into that equation. She thinks if you’re going to go out into this chaotic world, you might as well have a Rhododendron on to bring you joy or a beautiful texture to serve as your armor.
Davis started designing when the world felt especially chaotic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she and her two daughters watched every episode of Project Runway, sometimes until four in the morning. Eventually, the trio wanted to create alongside the show. Fabric was in short supply, so Davis pulled curtains off her walls to start making her own pants, jumpsuits, shirts, and dresses—her core basics.
Davis is the first to say she’s a designer, not a seamstress. She’s driven by heart and what feels right in her gut, not by thinking or overthinking. Above all, she wants Moss D to be a joyful pursuit.
“If it's not fun, I don’t want to do it anymore,” says Davis. “I don’t want this to be serious. That would be horrible.”
In reflecting on her journey and her process, Davis attributes a lot of the path to the power of saying yes. She walked into a Boulder boutique wearing something she’d made, and when they offered to start selling her pieces, she said yes. She also said yes to entering Denver Fashion Week’s Emerging Designer Challenge.
From there, the audience started saying yes, too. Davis won the popular vote, qualifying her for Denver Fashion Week, and then she won the audience vote again in the streetwear category.
She’s currently prepping for the next Denver Fashion Week in November, and while she plans to incorporate some seasonal designs into the show—ahem, capes!—she does not believe in following trends and sees them as limiting.
She describes trends as ethnocentric, encouraging the human predilection towards that “us vs them” mentality. She’s also the first to admit she was ethnocentric and superficial back in college. In moving to Boulder and working at numerous human service agencies, she’s been able to grow and evolve, both as her own person and in her family unit.
“Fashion can be so superficial,” says Davis, “I like my clothing and my fashion shows to have a deeper vibe of humanity, whether that be through texture, print, model, or music.”
Both of her daughters are artists, and she’s recently started printing their paintings and designs onto her pieces. Davis says it makes her heart so happy to create with their creations, and she especially loves how it keeps them all connected as her daughters head off to college.
For this upcoming show, she’s also pulling inspiration from her father and his farm in Pennsylvania, where she grew up. She made sure to emphasize that it’s a hobby farm and that it’s full of milkweed, butterflies, ferns, primroses—and the most magical pond!