“This dress changed our lives,” said Marcelo Gaia, the 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 Mr. 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 first showroom that Mirror Palais has had, its opening was something of an expansion for the brand, which Mr. 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 Hervé Léger was for their club-going millennial ancestors: a purveyor of unabashedly sexy and hyper-feminine going-out clothes.
Mr. 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 Mr. 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. 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 Mr. Gaia has sourced from estate sales and travels abroad.
As Mr. Gaia told the room about the Fairy dress, which traveled 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), Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Gaia, who was dressed in a gray cashmere cardigan and Celine loafers.
He started Mirror Palais with money he had made from another business, a fashion brand called Rosemilk, now shuttered. Mr. 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 like Elle and Wonderland. Not only did Rosemilk help Mr. 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.”
Ms. Hadid, along with other celebrities of a certain age, have helped fuel Mirror Palais’s momentum with a demographic perhaps best characterized 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 2025 Grammy Awards; and Dua Lipa, who attended a party for her 30th birthday in August wearing a burgundy mesh crochet gown from the brand.
The TikTok influencer Sophia La Corte, 24, was tapped by Mr. 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, Ms. LaCorte re-enacted the opening moments of Marilyn Monroe’s performance of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” as Mr. Gaia choreographed her hand movements and instructed a group of tuxedo-clad male models on how to serenade her for the camera.
“He can make you look so naked, but somehow still so covered and so classy,” Ms. LaCorte said.
Indeed, Mr. 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,” Mr. 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. Mr. Gaia made a bridal gown for the 33-year-old cooking influencer 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 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.
It’s a value proposition that can be hard to swallow for the young woman who casually stumbles on the designs on social media. Fast-fashion sellers like Shein, Temu and Amazon have capitalized on the sticker shock by selling Mirror Palais dupes.
Imitations have also proliferated on the TikTok Shop, where users can see how many units of an item have sold. Earlier this year, Mr. Gaia encountered a cheap replica on the TikTok Shop that had sold more than 2,000 units by the time he found it. The brand’s original version of the design had sold only 53.
“Unfortunately, this is happening completely against my will,” Mr. Gaia said in a video he posted on TikTok at the time. “I work full time as the unpaid research and development department of countless fast-fashion companies.” In another (older) video, Mr. Gaia burned two scraps of fabric — one was real silk, he said, and the other synthetic — to demonstrate the difference between natural materials and the synthetic ones used in fast fashion.
While troublesome for his business, the copycats have had a galvanizing effect on Mr. Gaia, who described himself as the type of designer who will always opt for using a finer fabric.
“The only reason why I’m not rich is because I’m making everything so nice,” he said in an interview. “But I would rather people be angry at me for making something so beautiful that they can’t have, than not be successful in creating.”
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