Stephen Biga, our Founder, studied Fashion Design at Parsons School of Design, and Culture & Media Studies at The New School. He has worked in design at Proenza Schouler, Gabriela Hearst and Rodarte in both Los Angeles and New York City. In 2024 he founded Mel Usine, serving as our Creative Director.
Our debut collection, Spring / Summer 2026, will show in September 2025.
Mel Usine is an exploration of the tension woven between sensuality and prudence, strength and vulnerability, transparency and opacity, masculine and feminine. Told through the lense of historical research and tropes of forgotten French lore, Mel Usine creates an otherwise impossible dialogue between the historicity of dress with the codes of modern wardrobing.
Deploying a discerning emphasis on silhouette, proportion and texture, the materiality of Mel Usine curates cerebral clashes of provincially modest textiles with curious opulence. Mel Usine exists in this very sphere of opposites, mixing the temporality of memory with the exuberance of modernity.
At the heart of Mel Usine is a reverence to the precision of craft—centering savoir faire through surface design, luxurious fibers, sagacious fit, and precious details.
Mel Usine was conceived by an adoration of fashion, and through the veneration of the female form in all of its embodiments.