Marcelo Gaia, the founder of Mirror Palais, inside the brand’s studio in Manhattan. For many young women, famous and not, the brand Mirror Palais has become a go-to source of flirty frocks to wear on the town or for special occasions. Photo: The New York Times
“This dress changed our lives,” said Marcelo Gaia, founder of the brand Mirror Palais, as he held up a glittery frock. “It changed our business.”
It was a Thursday evening in early December, and Gaia, dressed in a white suit and a gauzy shirt unbuttoned to the navel, was addressing a crowd of people, many with champagne flutes in hand.
They had gathered for a party at his label’s new Manhattan showroom, decorated lavishly with Rococo sofas, antique lamps and Victorian chaise longues.
The opening of the first showroom that Mirror Palais has had was something of an expansion for the brand, which Gaia started in 2019 and is known for slinky, barely there attire that is sold online.
The showroom is a place for Mirror Palais customers (who book private appointments) to see, touch and engage with the clothing in real life.
For many Generation Z party girls, Mirror Palais has become what the bandage-dress-maker Herve Leger was for their club-going millennial ancestors: a purveyor of unabashedly sexy and hyper-feminine going-out clothes.
Gaia’s versions have included cropped shirts and halter tops that display tasteful flashes of breast from underneath and the sides, as well as floor-skimming gowns that are nearly see-through, with bits of lace providing coverage in certain strategic areas.
The clothes and Gaia, 35, who has short brown hair and a brown mustache, appear frequently in Mirror Palais TikTok videos, which feature him walking viewers through garments’ construction, flow and fabrication.
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The beige confection of rhinestone and mesh that he showed off to the crowd was one of the brand’s early hits.
Called the Fairy dress and no longer for sale, it spread widely on social media, helping Mirror Palais to find an audience with a business model based on preorders. Its designs are released online and then produced in quantities dependent on the number of orders received.
Some are made in New York, and others in India and China, with materials that often include deadstock fabrics that Gaia has sourced from estate sales and travels abroad.
As Gaia told the room about the Fairy dress, which travelled the internet after being featured in a TikTok video posted in January 2021, some in the audience started to chant, “Bring it back, bring it back!”
Weeks before the event, in an interview at the Mirror Palais office, which is three floors above its showroom in a nondescript building in Chinatown (and is also furnished with French antiques), Gaia recounted how the initial interest in the dress led to a lot of headaches.
Production issues – an early batch of dresses was cut entirely wrong – left some customers waiting months to receive orders, and others were refunded (he employs a small team, many of whom started working for the brand as interns).
The episode revealed kinks in his then-nascent brand’s business model, but it also bolstered Gaia’s confidence in his design-it-and-they-will-come philosophy.
“I could basically create something new, take a picture of it, and then open a preorder for it based on the reaction itself,” said Gaia, who was dressed in a grey cashmere cardigan and Celine loafers.
He started Mirror Palais with money he had made from another business, a fashion brand called Rosemilk, now shuttered.
Gaia founded that label with a friend in 2017, after working for almost a decade behind the scenes in fashion production, assisting stylists on cover shoots for publications including Elle and Wonderland.
Sophia La Corte during a photo session for a Mirror Palais holiday campaign in Manhattan. Photo: The New York Times
Not only did Rosemilk help Gaia home in on an aesthetic – its clothes were also romantic and feminine, if not as spangly – but also a target customer.
“I got our first piece on Bella Hadid,” he recalled. “She wore it at Coachella. Halsey wore it as well that same weekend.”
Hadid, along with other celebrities of a certain age, have helped fuel Mirror Palais’ momentum with a demographic perhaps best characterised as “women under 30 who are extremely online”.
Those stars include Olivia Rodrigo and Hailey Bieber, who routinely wear the label; Kylie Jenner, whose Instagram post announcing her second pregnancy featured photos of her in a bump-baring Mirror Palais ensemble; Sabrina Carpenter, who wore a glimmering Mirror Palais design to an after-party for the Grammy Awards; and Dua Lipa, who attended a party for her 30th birthday in August wearing a burgundy mesh crochet gown from the brand.
TikTok personality Sophia La Corte, 24, was tapped by Gaia to star in a recent Mirror Palais holiday campaign.
On the set of the shoot in November, after slipping into the brand’s shimmery floor-length Starlite dress and having her hair styled into oversize curls, LaCorte reenacted the opening moments of Marilyn Monroe’s performance of Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend as Gaia choreographed her hand movements and instructed a group of tuxedo-clad male models on how to serenade her for the camera.
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“He can make you look so naked, but somehow still so covered and so classy,” LaCorte said.
Indeed, Gaia sees himself as something of a specialist in the naked-dressing look. His brand’s profile has proliferated alongside the rise of weight-loss drugs and cosmetic procedures that generally extol youthful bodies.
“I design clothes that are very much like... I don’t want to say body conscious, because they’re not body conscious, but the body is what makes the garment,” Gaia said.
His clothes’ sparkly aesthetic has perhaps not surprisingly given Mirror Palais a reputation as a label to wear on special occasions – birthdays, for instance, or weddings.
Gaia made a bridal gown for 33-year-old cooking personality Emily Mariko, and he said others have ordered his designs for their nuptials. He hopes to expand further into bridal in the near future.
“I’m looking forward to more big, expensive dresses,” he said, citing a fact about pricing that those familiar with Mirror Palais know.
Its clothing, skimpy as it may be, is not cheap. Most dresses cost three figures, and some cost four. – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
