Nora Grace-Flood Photo
Jerlisa Thomas with her soulmate sewing machine outside of Clarion Hotel, her temporary lodgings.
Show must go on: Thomas gets models ready for her Friday's “50 Shades of Chem" fashion show at Terminal 110.
When fashion designer Jerlisa Thomas returned to her Warner Street apartment for the first time following a three-alarm fire, she was bombarded with ash and loss — until she noticed a treasure the flames failed to destroy: Her sewing machine.
On Feb. 14, the 26-year-old model and designer was out bartending and promoting her first fashion show, a lingerie line-up from her business Chemistry Lingerie that she planned to present the next month. She had selected Valentine’s Day to launch ticket sales, but when she returned to her home studio at 1 a.m., she saw cops, crying neighbors and the potential death of her lifelong dream.
“Is this for real?” she questioned.
“I had just received my inventory,” Thomas recalled, explaining that she purchases fabrics and articles of clothing wholesale before altering them into her personal products ready for sale. “The first thing I thought about was my inventory, and then I started thinking about my laptop — business documents, receipts of everything I’ve paid for, my Chemistry Lingerie file, my portfolio of all the models I had and all the information that they’d just filled out.”
Thomas' bedroom after the fire.
All of her belongings, including years of sketches, stitches and a thought-through plan to finally showcase years of hard work, appeared ruined. But the survival of Thomas’ sewing machine affirmed the first major decision she made to retain control of her life.
“I gave myself a day. I gave myself another day. And then I said, what am I gonna do? I can’t just sit here and mope.”
Thomas told herself: The show must go on.
On Monday night, Thomas and her crew of models completed their final dress rehearsal for an upcoming event that will feature little “dress.” On Friday, Thomas’ birthday, models of all shapes and sizes will strip down inside New Haven’s Terminal 110 and show off boxers, bras, and thongs styled to meet Thomas’ theme, “50 Shades of Chem.”
While temporarily living alongside other Warner fire victims out of the Clarion Hotel in Hamden, Thomas has been working four times more than usual. She picked up extra shifts at a restaurant in Westport to address the financial burden of the fire while spending the remainder of her free time rearranging and coordinating looks and event details to stay on track to avoid canceling her chosen venue, models, and ticket sales.
“All I do now is go to work,” she said. Instead of her typical, meticulously curated and tailored outfits, Thomas said, “I just wear black” to her job — or sweatsuits donated to her by caring friends and family.
“I realize now the impact I have on some people,” she reflected. “They tell me that I inspire them, that I’m headstrong. Sometimes I feel like people just tell me that to make me feel better, but I’ve realized — they’re actually right!”
Models at Monday's rehearsal for Friday's fashion show.
“Work, work, work, work, work,” is one of Thomas’ mottos, one sung by her role model Rihanna, the Barbadian pop star and creator of Fenty Beauty and and Savage X Fenty, the latter of which is an all-inclusive undergarment company.
Overcoming adversity and determining her own destination, Thomas said, helped her realize: If people like Rihanna, or Thomas’ other heroes such as model and influencer Tanaya Henry, can achieve their visions, “Why not me?”
One day, Thomas said, she hopes to go international with her brand and open up a storefront in Dominica, her parents’ home country.
Thomas’ company, Chemistry Lingerie, seeks to “include everyone” in that sense of possibility.
“When you meet someone and you’re super attracted to them, there’s the potential of sexual connection. That potential is chemistry,” Thomas said.
In other words, Thomas’ brand is not just about “confidence, sexiness, and resilience,” but about “potential” — the potential to connect not just with another person, but with oneself and one’s wide range of desires, whether that’s uncovering love and attraction or building self-esteem and empowerment.
Potential becomes reality through psychological adaptation and action. That theory is threaded into the name of Thomas’ business.
“In college I was doing terribly in chemistry,” Thomas remembered. “I was fighting for my grades. I ended up with a C minus, but I considered that failing.”
“I wanted another opportunity where I could succeed in chemistry,” she said with a laugh. So she created a lingerie brand — based on styles she had already been coming up with in her dorm room on a sewing machine gifted to her by her mother — and named it Chemistry.
“I’ll succeed in that,” she told herself.
Thomas uses the terminology she picked up in that college class to define her styles — a patent leather piece, she offered as an example, would be labeled “exothermic,” because it “gives off heat.”
Thomas began her business two years ago in March 2020, another time of hardship and emotional duress for individuals across the globe.
“It was during quarantine. I was stationed at home and collecting unemployment,” she said.
After years of trying to make it as a model, navigating “weird scamming types of energies” and restrictive standards for her height and weight, she asked herself: “Instead of trying to work for a company, why don’t I try to create one myself?”
Rather than spending her time attempting to discern which job offers were legitimate and which were fake or creating a false version of herself to appeal to agencies, she could build her own reality in which individuals with different appearances and preferences were all celebrated and seen.
In her mind, finally holding a fashion show represented the advancement of her business — she had accumulated the styles, capital, and audience to pull a full event together.
While the loss of her home created new obstacles and obscured her course of action, the fire ultimately fueled Thomas’ sense of self-actualization. “Being a young business owner is about learning how to work certain things and how to move forward when things go left,” she said.
Thomas practices bowing at the end of Monday's rehearsal.
“I’ve been in business for two years — the fashion show is like a birthday gift for myself,” she stated. If she had canceled or postponed the event, she said, “I wouldn’t know what else to do on my birthday!”
Though at first Thomas struggled to believe the fact that the fire had even happened, she soon accepted the situation, used her water-sign energy to cool down, and picked up where she left off with a new approach to the world.
“I’m alive,” Thomas stated. “That’s what I’m grateful for. And I can start my life over again in the direction I’m supposed to go in.”
Tickets for the event — which will feature live music and pole dancing this Friday at 9 P.M.— can be purchased here. Attendees are encouraged to bring donations for fire victims, like Thomas, which will be collected upon entry.
