How This Aussie Designer’s Wearable Chainmail Was Worn To The Met Gala
enter another realm
By Victoria Lewis | 2nd September 2026The world of Catholic Guilt has seen Melbourne creative Ella Jackson move to LA and dress celebrities like Julia Fox, Blackpink’s Lisa, and even have one of her garments worn at the 2026 Met Gala, but fashion was never supposed to be the full story.
It was a “perfect storm” of life circumstances that saw Jackson, at the time a music engineer and singer-songwriter, conjure up a fashion brand called Catholic Guilt. A handmade stage outfit made from rosary charm chainmail coupled with Melbourne’s pandemic lockdowns left Jackson reflecting on her own feelings of religious guilt. Still, she says the brand is less a rebellion against religion, and more “a reclamation of self and of body.”
A therapeutic practice
She describes the therapeutic benefits that creating chainmail had at this point in her life; each stainless-steel garment, designed to both show off the body and protect it, came to represent a heavy armour that provided strength at a vulnerable time. Turning stainless steel rings into a malleable fabric takes hours of painstaking work, and it was this rigorous process, the hours spent on her knees metaphorically “praying at a mannequin”, that the physical weight of chainmail was actually rather enlightening.
“I think it’s done the job because I feel like I’ve exorcised a lot of those demons now, and I’m now just kind of looking forward towards the next thing to work through,” she reflects.
On her LA move
Having moved to LA earlier this year, somewhat serendipitously after a last-minute Met Gala commission extended her stay, the ball hasn’t stopped rolling for Catholic Guilt. Whilst continuing to handmake garments for her online shop, Jackson is making preparations to expand the Catholic Guilt universe, working on her first showroom in LA; exploring homewares by designing chainmail furniture; and creating her next major body of work, a triptych of performance art including her own film, a runway show, and a secret finale. “I feel like I’ve travelled through some kind of vortex since I’ve gotten to LA,” she says, listing her many parallel projects.
Though a lot is still up in the air, Jackson’s self-determination, what some may call blind faith, persists. It might all seem chaotic and reactionary, and in Jackson’s words sometimes it is, but each element of the Catholic Guilt world has been carefully constructed, each idea in motion for years before coming to fruition. So much so, the title of her upcoming three-part project, ‘Concrete Pornographic Moon’, has sat tattooed on her wrist for over a year. “I have this belief that every big creative project that I work on, I get a little sigil for it on my body as a means of manifesting it to actually happen.”
The characters of the Catholic Guilt world
Similar to its founder’s creative process, a Catholic Guilt piece isn’t bound by time or trends but designed to be an everlasting piece of storytelling.
“I love the idea of, far beyond humanity, some alien civilisation encountering Earth [and] finding my clothing hidden amongst the ashes.”
As an innate storyteller, a skill likely handed down from her novelist father, Jackson assigns every garment its own character, some based on fragments of inner herself, while some are musings from fantasy realms. The dress that walked the steps of the Met Gala on start-up investor Sarah Guo, named “Tears of Venus”, was dedicated to the ancient goddess of “beauty, desire, war, and transformation”, with each amethyst encrusted into stainless steel representing a tear.
Combining cinema and fashion in her upcoming collection, the looks will be individual character studies represented on screen and then reprised later on the runway. Meanwhile, her showroom, set to open in the coming months, will be a physical manifestation of the collection’s fantasy world.
As for what the immediate future holds for the Catholic Guilt universe, Jackson wants to give the story the time it deserves. “If anything, chainmail has taught me it’s to be patient, and you’ll reap the rewards down the line, after you’ve put in the hard work.”
As her new creative awakening extends into more facets of herself, she is driven by one simple principle: that when she follows her intuition, puts herself out there, and takes it one chainmail link at a time, the story writes itself.
Imagery: Cerise Hamam and Angela Ricciardi
