April 2026
Held Close
There is a particular kind of confidence that lives in the details we keep close to the chest; the ones no one else sees at first, but that shape everything that follows.
This issue turns toward those intimate decisions. Sleepwear and lingerie are considered not as afterthoughts, but as the foundation of how we carry ourselves. Fragrance becomes a portal, shifting mood and memory in equal measure. Even the garden takes on new meaning, cultivated not just for beauty, but for curiosity, ritual and a deeper connection to what grows beneath the surface.
Across these pages, authentic self-expression emerges in many forms. Scarlett Luxe reflects on vintage style as a conduit for self-confidence, while Cameon Wade brings clarity to what Poetcore looks like in practice; grounded, deliberate, functional and deeply personal.
What emerges is a throughline of consideration. The understanding that how we present externally is often shaped long before we step into the light.
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Cover:
Model: Scarlett Luxe
Photography: Belle Prive Photography
Style
Cover Story: The Dress That Changed Everything: @scarlettluxe on Vintage Style and Self-Perception
A reflection on confidence, chronic illness and the vintage-inspired pieces that make her feel most at home in her body
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Finding your personal style doesn’t happen all at once.
It begins with a spark. A beloved character. A lipstick shade. A silhouette that feels different. A moment where something clicks, even if you can’t quite explain why. From there, it unfolds slowly. Through trial and error. Through pieces that almost work, then don’t. Bad haircuts. Failed experiments. Through the gradual realization that style is less about arriving at a look and more about recognizing a feeling.
Below, one of our favourite working pinup models, Scarlett Luxe, offers a rare look into her experience of finding a personal style that feels entirely her own. From early fascination to the moment a single dress changed how she saw herself, her story moves through experimentation, confidence and the gradual shift toward dressing for her own gaze.
Along the way, she offers both perspective and practical insight, mapping a path that feels as personal as it does possible.
In the Atelier with Videnoir: Gothic Lingerie as Living Art
Darkly inspired designs created to be worn, and impossible not to photograph
By: Amanda Albert
Videnoir’s distinctly gothic visual language draws from a lifelong affinity for the dark, shaped by film, history, art, and architecture. This foundation is reinforced by more than fifteen years of dressmaking experience and a lineage rooted in corsetry and atelier work, carried forward through study and practice.
The design house moves with a near-devotional focus on precise pattern making and refined fit. Construction is approached with equal care, balancing comfort with a strong visual point of view. Each decision is made in close proximity to the body it is intended to shape.
In our conversation with Alice, Videnoir’s co-founder, we step inside the technical architecture behind each piece. She reflects on the references that inform the work, as well as the collections still to come.
Designed for the Divine: National Lingerie Day, Properly Observed
13 female-founded labels creating lingerie for the divine feminine
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
The divine feminine appears the moment instinct is no longer edited. She is intuitive, complicated, occasionally feral and entirely uninterested in being polite for the sake of someone else’s comfort. Lingerie designed for her does not attempt to smooth the edges, it celebrates the body exactly as it exists. Every curve. Every dimple. Even the sharp edge of your attitude.
In honour of National Lingerie Day, we gathered 13 labels founded by women who understand this philosophy intimately. These designers create pieces that treat lingerie as expression.
If your lingerie drawer has been feeling uninspired, the below designers have suggestions. Consider this your lingerie drawer upgrade.
After Dark: A Dark Feminine Guide to Spring Sleepwear
From vintage-inspired nightgowns to oversized bat robes, these pieces make midnight feel like a dress code
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
We respect the humble concert tee. It has carried many of us through late nights and questionable television choices.
Still, there are evenings that call for something slightly more interesting. A true-crime marathon deserves better. So does a smutty paperback, a midnight snack, or a last-minute girls’ night that somehow ends with someone opening a second bottle of wine.
We’ve curated a dark feminine sleepwear edit for evenings that deserve better styling.
Your Summer Pinup Style Playbook
Bettie, Marilyn, Sophia, Elizabeth and Grace offer five different ways to approach vintage glamour
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Summer arrives with fresh possibilities.
Longer days stretch into sun-soaked afternoons. Plans take shape somewhere between a picnic, a beach day, a shopping excursion, a BBQ and the promise of staying out a little longer. The question of what to wear begins to bloom with possibility.
It is the perfect season to revisit a style that was built for exactly this kind of light; the pinup aesthetic has always belonged to summer.
The word “pinup” suggests a singular image. A confident woman. A defined silhouette. A certain kind of pose. In practice, it was never quite that narrow. The women who shaped the look approached it differently. Bettie Page preferred a little mischief with her looks while Marilyn Monroe embodied bombshell energy with the wiggle dress. Sophia Loren brought unforgettable curves to coastal glamour, Elizabeth Taylor treated every look like a high-contrast close-up and Grace Kelly moved through elegance with effortless control.
Each offers a distinct mood, forming a summer style guide of pinup-inspired possibilities, from cherry prints and polka dots to silhouettes that shift depending on who is wearing them.
Summer Skin Survival Guide: 7 Colour Correctors That Hold Up to Redness
From light touch to full coverage, cooling formulas to easy blends—these are the ones that actually work
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
After a long, dark winter, the return of sunlight is something to celebrate. It also marks the annual goth girlie battle with direct light on carefully cultivated complexions goth hiss.
So, how do you win the war against unwanted redness in the unrelenting gleam of summer sun? We can help.
We tested seven colour correctors to stay one step ahead. Here’s what we found.
35 Dark Feminine Fragrances: The Collector’s Guide
Curating a perfume cabinet stocked with a haunted selection of elegant scents
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
A well-chosen perfume behaves like a small portal. One mist alters the atmosphere. The room remains the same, yet something shifts. Suddenly the evening carries the suggestion of somewhere else. A garden after midnight. Salt wind from distant water. The memory of old houses lined with books.
The fragrances in this cabinet operate exactly this way. Each one offers a different passage into the world it evokes.
The Gothic Aromancer: Legend-Led Fragrance with Cursed
Inside Cursed, redefining fragrance through story-led composition
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Betrayed by the endless parade of luxury beauty counters and their soul-less, cookie-cutter curations, she was tirelessly searching for a fragrance that could mirror her darkness.
Light fractured across mirrored displays as she moved from counter to counter, the air thick with sweetness that clung and collapsed all at once. Bottles gleamed in identical rows, each promising something unforgettable, each dissolving before it could take hold. The scent shifted, blurred, soured and disappeared.
She was searching for something with depth. A cemetery after midnight. A raven stationed above. The carnivorous presence of a mid-century vampire moving through a crowded room, unnoticed but unmistakable.
Just as she began to abandon all hope, something sinful appeared in the distance. A evil flicker. A ominous glow. The air shifted as she approached, sweetness falling away. It was strange. Unsettling. Positively haunted. This is exactly what she was looking for.
From within, Cursed, the gothic Aromancer spoke, not in formulas, but in consequence. We listened as the process revealed itself: scent summoned from narrative, notes chosen for what they imply as much as what they are, compositions built slowly until the air feels altered.
Consider this your invitation into a world where each elixir is drawn from the air of aftermath, doomed from the moment it is composed. Complex and unforgettable.
Perfume, Composed from the Ground Up: A Conversation with Jill McKeever, Owner and Perfumer of For Strange Women
At For Strange Women, scent begins with raw botanicals, unfolding slowly against the skin
By: The Lace Ledger
Step into a world where perfume begins in the soil.
At For Strange Women, scent is cultivated, gathered, studied and coaxed into form through plant matter that still carries the memory of where it grew.
Each blend is built with intention. Each note arrives with purpose.
For those who find traditional fragrance overwhelming, this approach offers something else entirely. The compositions move gently, settling into the skin instead of sitting on top of it. What unfolds feels personal, shaped as much by the wearer as by the materials themselves. Owner and perfumer Jill McKeever gives us a behind-the-scenes look at her process and what comes next.
The Arts
Cameon Wade on Creative Instinct and a Life Shaped by Story
Moving between the written, spoken and on-screen world, she is creating a growing body of work and personal style that reflects the same lived-in honesty
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Not every poet is easy to recognize.
There’s no uniform. No fixed setting. No single way the work is supposed to appear. No perfect moment or atmosphere. The muse turns up in trenches, and a working poet but be prepared.
Cameon Wade creates on the move, telling stories in real time that readers recognize themselves inside. Her work evolves as she does.
In doing so, she has carved out a space in contemporary poetry that meets people where they are, giving language to difficult experiences that often struggle to discuss and, in the process, making them feel a little less alone.
Here, we meet her in that movement, following how ideas take shape and how they are expressed, offering us a glimpse into the life of working poet, in real time.
The Poetcore Revival: Letters, Journals & the Romance of Writing
For National Poetry Month (and beyond), rediscover the grounding ritual of writing words intended to last
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
A woman sits at the edge of a calm lake, a leather journal resting against her knee, while evening gathers around her like warm wool blanket. Across the world (or in another time), a shadowy figure leans over a desk, scribbling furiously by candlelight as though the page itself understands that certain thoughts must be caught before they disappear.
Regardless of time or place, time impulse doesn’t change; putting pen to paper claims an idea and anchors it to a moment in time, so that a memory becomes something you can hold in your hands. A portal to the past.
In a culture built on keyboards and disappearing messages, the act of writing by hand offers a more romantic rhythm.
For National Poetry Month, we invite you to slow down with us and return to the page.
House & Haunt
On the Hunt With Chloe Hurst: Black Blooms and Botanicals
@theg0thgarden’s shares how to source and grow a goth garden at home
By: The Lace Ledger
Chloe Hurst’s garden has the kind of effect that stops you in your tracks; it’s absolutely incredible. The sheer volume of dark blooms, unusual foliage and inky texture feels almost unreal, as though someone brought to life gothic daydream and planted it at full scale.
It’s truly gorgeous. Exceptional, really. For a novice gardener, it is also slightly intimidating. The first reaction is admiration, closely followed by the suspicion that a garden like this belongs to someone with more time, more knowledge and a greenhouse full of secrets.
Chloe is refreshingly practical on that front. Below, she graciously breaks the process down step by step, walking us through bringing to life a goth garden of our own from planning the space, which plants make the best starting point, where to shop and even what fertilizer to reach for once things begin to grow.
So, we asked Chloe to start at the beginning.
In the Garden After Dusk with @briannas_planttok
Dark foliage, medicinal botanicals, poison garden lore and the passion behind Brianna’s homestead practice
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
All day, the garden blooms in broad, sun-filled strokes, standing proud and tall, admired by passers by and onlooking neighbours.
As the sunsets, and the air cools, the noise of the day drops away until only small sounds remain; leaves dancing in the wind, something distant calling from the trees. This is the call of the garden that resounds most authentically with Brianna. Not at daybreak, but in the hours when the garden feels most like itself: a mythical, meditative place for grounding, cultivation and self-reflection.
Here, we step into her world after dusk, where the world slows, the rhythm steadies and the garden reveals what it’s been doing all along.
Culture
Quieting the Static: Two Months with Moments Mushroom Psilocybin Microdoses
We tested Neuro and Flow over 60 days to see how microdosing supports focus and mood
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
It starts as a flicker. Then a sharp, crackling wash of sound. The image fractures, light breaking into fragments, dissolving into a restless field of grey. You move closer. Adjust the dial. Pause, holding still as if your body might somehow steady the signal. For a moment, it almost clears. Then it slips again.
TV static is a small disruption, but a jarring, abrasive one. Anxiety carries the same rhythm, persistent, unsettling and not always overwhelming, but constant enough to send you careening off course.
We spent two months with Moment Mushrooms psilocybin microdoses to see what might shift.
Here’s what we found.