I started my journey as a fashion designer, culminating with daring to reveal what was under my dress in autobiographical self portraiture. I built an entire body of work around it — stripping down to my undergarments in front of the camera, in front of the audience, thinking that if I could bare my body I could bear my truth. It was also a frantic effort to reclaim what I had spent years giving away — to musicians, to celebrities, to the whole machinery of fame I served as hired help. I was an exhibitionist who believed dressing and undressing was the same as being seen.
It wasn't.
I didn't realize I was unable to go deep until I got that sick. Until I had no costume left.
The beauty and fashion industry — the one I built my career inside, the one I served, as hired help, up close in the celebrity world — is a hierarchy of haves and have-nots. It runs on the lie that beauty lives outside of yourself. That health is something you acquire. That worth is performed, packaged, and leveraged until maybe someday, if you do it well enough and long enough, it becomes real.
I believed it. I built my life inside of it, with my hands, with my craft, thread by thread. And the price of that service was myself.
What followed was twelve years of total breakdown. I was stripped down to my own rafters — my ego, my health, my community, my craft — all of it taken. My hemoglobin dropped to 2.6. I was alone with the mirror and a face I barely recognized. I documented every stage of it.
I didn't get well from without. It was an inside job.
I healed myself through quantum biology — the intelligence of light, water, and minerals as the actual operating system of the human body. Through biomagnetism. Through rebuilding my mineral matrix from a hemoglobin of 2.6 back to a woman who creates herself as canvas. Self portraiture. Bespoke. Exhibition.
What I found in the process was a blueprint. A true architecture of well living built from 13 pillars — from The Edit to The Compass, The Elements to The Shadow, The DNA to The Boss — and culminating in the 13th, The Love. The one that cannot be accessed outward until it is first anchored within. The one that changes everything.
This is the fashion of well living. This is Béla Gusta.
I run my practice now from the far southern edge of Los Angeles, where the city thins into sea and light. Surrounded by plants and herbs and the wildlife I call into my space even here, in the harbor's breath. This is how my downloads reach me — through interconnection, through the same intelligence that runs through the water and the minerals and the light. Through you.
Our stories are interconnected. We are entwined in pattern recognition. There is a reason you're finding me.
Read the full story →here
I can't wait to meet you.
Lauren Bradley
