September 20, 2026
From Fermathe to the Runway: Levoy Exil × Gabriela Hearst
How “Solrou: The Sun’s creates Unity” traveled from a Haitian mountain studio to the Gabriela Hearst Spring Summer 2024 runway at New York Fashion Week.
From the mountains to the runway
In 2023, one of Levoy Exil’s masterpieces, “Solrou: The Sun’s creates Unity,” became the wellspring of Gabriela Hearst’s luxurious Spring Summer 2024 collection — shown on the runway at New York Fashion Week. It is rare for a fashion house of that stature to build an entire collection around a living Haitian painter, and rarer still for the source to be a single canvas. But “Solrou” offered what Hearst was looking for: suns, spirits, and sacred geometry, a vision of unity rendered in Exil’s unmistakable hand.
5,000 hours of craft
The collection was crafted with 31 artisans over more than 5,000 hours — a scale of handwork that mirrors the patience of Exil’s own pointillist method. His imagery traveled from a mountain studio in Fermathe to the world stage without losing its meaning: the sun that creates unity in the painting became a sun carried down the runway.
Watch the film
On the runway
Runway photographs by Filippo Fior / GoRunway.com
Why it matters
For Levoy Exil, the collaboration was more than fashion. It was proof that the spiritual language he has painted for over fifty years speaks fluently to the contemporary world — and that Haitian art belongs wherever the world’s eyes are looking.