Studying at Xavier University of Louisiana, at nineteen, Maurice Fonson was in New Orleans, attending classes and doing all the things a student is supposed to do while trying to imagine what adulthood might eventually look like.

On Fridays, however, he would leave school and fly to New York.

Craigslist was still Craigslist, as he remembers it, and independent producers and artists would post jobs looking for writers and musicians. Maurice would arrive in the city, spend Saturday inside somebody’s smoke-filled studio writing hooks, go to the Village Underground on Sunday night to listen to singers at the open mic, then head straight to JFK.

The flight back left around five in the morning and chemistry class started at eight.

That was his routine for approximately two years.

Watch our full conversation on YouTube or continue reading the article.

He tells me there was barely any money in it, as he would spend whatever he earned on the flight ticket and a night in a hotel. Only his grandmother knew what Maurice was really doing. Someone, after all, needed to know where he was.

And what Maurice knew was that he wanted music badly enough to keep returning to New York every weekend.

“I had this ambition and this dream to be a massive singer, songwriter and performer,” he tells me on a Zoom call from New York at the end of July. “But I didn’t necessarily know how I was going to get there.”

We almost always like to arrange the past while telling stories about success once success has already happened, and every difficult decision begins to resemble foreshadowing. The airport floors, the missed flights, bad jobs, unpaid work, failed relationships and self-doubt become necessary characters in an origin story whose ending now seems obvious.

But life could never be neatly organised while it is happening.

Maurice’s career did not wait for him to understand himself though. There was heartbreak and fear. But there was also ambition.

Before the credits

Maurice remembers Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation tour as the first concert he attended at the age of seven or eight. There were difficult things happening inside his household, and music offered him an escape, another place to go to.

Curiosity led him to discover Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis as the people composing Janet’s hits and those of others of his favourite artists, and he recalls their work as foundational to the way he understood songwriting. Maurice later discovered artists such as Babyface and Diane Warren and became fascinated by writers who could evoke emotion through their craft.

The songs he heard as a child changed their essence as he grew older because life gave him the context he had not possessed at seven or eight. Lyrics carried meaning he could recognise from his experience.

“That’s what makes music universal,” he says. “We’re connected by experiences.”

It became a kind of blueprint of learning how someone’s private experience could leave one person’s life and somehow enter somebody else’s. Even as a young man, he knew he wanted to be famous, to sing, to write, and years later he would carry his experience into the songs he would write for himself and for others.

Writing yourself through somebody else

One of the more revealing moments in our conversation arrives when Maurice tells me about “Unlearn Me,” a song originally written as a demo for Leona Lewis that can still be heard on YouTube.

At the time, he was going through what he believed was the end of a difficult relationship. As he would discover soon, there would be more heartbreak to come.

He had reached the point where he wanted to somehow remove the relationship from himself—to unlearn the person, the love and the version of life they had built together.

So he wrote the song—for somebody else.

He tells me that writing for another artist can require imagination, but sometimes the artist arrives with a story and the session begins to resemble therapy as everybody tries to find the language for what that person is experiencing.

And sometimes Maurice’s own life entered the room. He shares he could place pieces of himself inside the music another artist might eventually sing.

Which makes us doubt if there is a significant distinction between Maurice Fonson, the songwriter, and Maurice Fonson, the artist. It turns out the credits might make those identities look separate, but his emotional life never really did.

“The things happening in my personal life will always seep into the music,” he says.

As the years passed, that life continued moving beside the career, into something quite familiar to all of us.

There were broken hearts. Jobs. Family problems. The pandemic. Relationships that would not end cleanly.

Earlier projects such as The X Files became places where he could further explore what had happened to him—what he had done, what other people had done, and what remained once a relationship was supposedly over.

Meanwhile, professionally, Maurice was already becoming the person his nineteen-year-old self had flown to New York hoping to become.

Success does not wait for certainty

Jennifer Hudson.

Leona Lewis.

Sebastián Yatra.

And now Madonna.

Names so impressive, a person would assume the story would look simple from the outside, even if it was not.

“If you had told me two years ago that I would have a song on a Madonna album, I would have said, ‘You’re crazy,’” Maurice says.

His work on “School” for Madonna’s Confessions II marks what he describes as another level in his career, one that has brought new attention to him. It might even come across as “overnight success,” but Maurice knows better.

“There were so many times when I wasn’t sure whether I was ever going to be seen,” he says.

Now the recognition is arriving, but he does not talk about it like someone who believes the work has finally been completed. He talks about levels and what is next, and about being thankful.

Maurice does not pretend to be indifferent to success. There is so much excitement that drives his engine. He tells me he would like to embark on a world tour, win a Grammy, write for Beyoncé, Rihanna and Usher.

Maurice also insists that underneath every accolade sits the same reason he was willing to spend almost everything he earned travelling between New Orleans and New York.

“This is still a piece of my soul,” he says.

The Fun version

When Maurice talks about his upcoming EP Fun, his face lights up and he is obviously happy and full of joy.

While much of his previous music had often come from heartbreak and introspection, that is not the space he wants to inhabit anymore.

“I’ve been sad long enough,” he says. “I’ve healed. This is the new version. This is the healed version of me.”

Fun began taking shape in early 2025, after some family difficulties and a broader reassessment of what Maurice wanted his life to contain after the pandemic.

He wanted to keep what made sense and what felt good, what did not sit quite so heavily on his spirit.

The title Fun sounds deliberately uncomplicated because, in some ways, it is. Maurice just wants to have fun. And he wants the listeners to have fun.

He describes the project as light, joyful and escapist—the world has not suddenly become light, but it never can.

“We’re living through a dark period,” he says.

But perhaps, for twenty minutes, music can allow us to remove the darkness and just enjoy the rhythm.

His first single from the project, “Sweet,” arrives on August 14, and carries that lighter Maurice into the world. He describes himself now as bubbly, easygoing, even “a lovable teddy bear,” and he shares the song lives inside the uncomplicated pleasure of being infatuated with somebody.

“The song is about being a little infatuated — that feeling of being so into somebody that you’re completely open. I feel like that right now. I’m dating, I’m out here in these streets, and I just want to enjoy it. It’s that feeling when somebody has you hooked and you almost don’t care. They’re just sweet. They’re everything in that moment.”

There are deeper moments across the project, and another EP is planned to explore more of what it took for him to arrive at Fun in the first place.

It is interesting sequencing—Maurice is giving us the joy before showing us what has built it.

The old skin does not disappear

The Wonder Mag’s August issue has been built around the idea of a Summer of Reinvention, and I asked Maurice whether reinvention means becoming somebody entirely new or removing versions of ourselves that no longer fit.

His answer resists the clean transformation. He says we carry the past with us.

“You can shed your skin and reinvent yourself,” he says, but whoever emerges still exists because of what came before.

The successful songwriter still remembers wondering whether anybody would ever see him. And the healed version still remembers heartbreak.

When I ask which version of himself he wants to leave behind, Maurice answers quickly.

“The scared version.”

I ask what still scares him.

“A lot of things.”

Maurice is learning not to beat himself up as relentlessly as he once did. He does not want the clouds permanently hanging over him anymore.

Time, however, remains one of the more difficult fears — “like an enemy in my head,” he says.

Sometimes he still believes certain things must happen immediately. If they do not, the mind can make the delay feel catastrophic.

It is difficult not to recognise something painfully contemporary in that feeling as we are all surrounded by public timelines or a stranger we see in our feeds talking about success without bringing any of the years that preceded it.

Maurice has lived long enough inside music to know that careers rarely move according to the timeline somebody imagined at nineteen. He is learning to believe something else now:

“What is mine will be mine in the time it is meant to be mine.”

He admits that accepting this is difficult, but perhaps that is why it matters.

There is no ceiling

When I ask what excites him most now, his answer is immediate.

“There are no limits. The sky is the limit,” he says. “There’s no ceiling.”

Two years ago, Madonna seemed impossible, and now their record sits on his résumé.

Maurice wants the Grammy and the global career. He wants the debut album he is already working toward. He wants to tour the world and move across genres.

There is something almost circular about hearing him say that, now that I know the story of the nineteen-year-old who kept travelling to New York without knowing exactly how any of it would happen.

That boy had ambition before certainty, while the Maurice speaking to me now has evidence.

It is not evidence that success finally turns you into a finished person, but evidence that a person can still be becoming while the life they wanted has already begun.

Our idea of success being the final and completed version of ourselves is not always true, and Maurice Fonson’s career suggests otherwise.

Sometimes the doors begin opening while you are still carrying heartbreak through them.

Recognition arrives while you are still afraid of time.

And sometimes, after years of turning pain into songs, reinvention can sound unexpectedly simple.

It can sound like allowing yourself to enjoy what has already arrived.

It can sound like Fun.

As we are catching up on the latest events in our lives and talking about some trends we have seen recently, Bulgarian designer Stoyan Dimitrov begins what will become our interview with an undressing before I have even asked a single question.

“When you take off the corset, you are left naked,” he says, as if it were the most common way to start a conversation about anything, whether it is a garment, a body, or a life. He tells me that social media is the corset now. We shape ourselves inside it, we allow it to hold us in the form we would like to be seen in, and underneath it we are exactly as naked as we always were.

It is a strange thing to hear from a man who has spent twenty-five years building structure into fabric for a living.

As a child of the 1970s, Stoyan found himself in a Bulgarian classroom in a subject called Practical Training, and while the other boys were sent toward woodworking and mechanics, Stoyan found textiles as the one station that did not frighten him. Soon his grandmother’s fabrics — the bolts she had kept from weddings and christenings (a way earlier generations stockpiled cloth) — were sacrificed to Stoyan’s first attempts at sewing.

He could not have known back then that this passion would turn into his path, but he knew it was interesting, which, for a child, is sometimes the same thing.

By the time he realized it mattered, he knew exactly what he wanted, and what he was willing to do to get it. Told by his family to keep his options open and study something practical alongside design, he sat the entrance mathematics exam knowing perfectly well he would do badly.

“I pretended I was practising mathematics, pretended I was studying, and pretended I understood,” he tells me, still showing a faint pride in his own younger nerve. The drawing exam — the one that actually mattered — was easy to pass. He was accepted third out of six boys in the whole region of Stara Zagora. And just like that, a door opened onto a road he has been walking ever since.

It is interesting to witness how a boy who sabotaged his own test scores to secure a particular future, decades later, describes an entire generation’s self-presentation as a corset we have built and cannot easily unlace.

Before it was anything else, the corset was simply a technology of taking a body and insisting it become a different shape than the one it arrived in. Stoyan does not romanticize this. Fashion, he says plainly, has always crossed the line between aesthetics and cruelty, and it crosses it often on women’s bodies in particular, because womenswear has always allowed for more dramatic transformation than men’s ever has.

He points me toward the Met Gala as he shares that he is “convinced they feel extremely uncomfortable in what they are wearing,” talking about the smiling, photographed bodies on that carpet. “Nevertheless, the point is the presentation.”

He is careful, though, to say the old rigid arithmetic — the 90-60-90 measurements that once defined what a body had to be to count as fashionable — has loosened globally, even if unevenly. Runways and campaigns increasingly hold space for bodies that would once have been rejected outright, mentioning examples of different ages, ethnicities, and shapes.

“Those old limitations no longer apply in the same way,” he tells me — the same sentence that Bulgarian supermodel Ivelina Choeva reached for when she talked about the industry that hired her precisely for the asymmetry Bulgaria once called ugly. Two people arrive independently at the same observation, that the rules are real, but they are not as fixed as the people inside them once believed.

Except — and here his voice changes — the newly-found liberation from standards does not arrive everywhere at the same speed. Eastern Europe, he says without much softening, remains “a slave to idealisation.” Filtered faces, corrected lips, a culture still fluent in the language of what can we fix. He does not exempt Bulgaria from this, and when I mention what I have noticed in Istanbul — the same appetite for sculpted, corrected, idealized bodies — he does not seem surprised. It is a shared inheritance, he suggests, not a coincidence.

The West, he believes, is drifting back toward the natural and the authentically imperfect. Eastern Europe, according to what he has observed, is still catching up — sometimes five years behind, sometimes more. Whether or not the timeline is exactly right, the diagnosis he makes is that “appearance matters to us far more than substance. We sell ourselves more through appearance than through knowledge.”

This is the part of the conversation Stoyan has clearly thought about before I ever asked. Social media, he tells me, has simply replaced the literal garment as the thing that shapes how a body — or a life — gets seen. “It is the foundation of the corset,” he says.

“From that point, the colour is added.” Everything else — the caption, the angle, the story we tell about ourselves online — is just detail laid over a structure we have already agreed to wear.

What is striking me is how little judgment he brings to this, because he does not frame the impulse to curate as vanity or dishonesty. Instead, he says that it seems closer to an old habit fashion has always understood, but is now practised by everyone instead of a professional few: “Anyone can create a different image of themselves and invent a story in order to conceal the truth.”

He does, however, draw one distinction that matters — the difference between how someone sees us and how we have chosen to present ourselves to be seen. The first is out of our hands. The second — the corset itself — is a decision, made and remade daily, about which version of the truth to put forward. “How they choose to see us after that is their decision,” he says, almost releasing the audience from responsibility for a costume he acknowledges he built himself.

There is a version of Stoyan that has nothing to do with a brand, a Met Gala, or a corset trending under someone else’s feed. It shows up when he paints — and when I ask about it, something in his voice shifts. “Perhaps I am saying it in this way for the first time,” he tells me, and then admits that he paints mostly in difficult states — heavy ones, the kind that do not always announce themselves as sad until he is already halfway through the canvas.

Behind him, out of frame for most of our conversation, hangs The Three Graces — three women caught in a pose he describes as unnatural, tense, and deliberately uncomfortable. He wanted the viewer to feel what the bodies on the canvas feel. He never finishes a painting all the way, he says he leaves it just short of resolved, because resolution would mean the emotion had nowhere left to go. And he almost never paints a full face. An eye. Part of a mouth. A suggestion of a person, never the whole of one. “That is why my paintings often contain an eye or part of a face, but never the complete face. There is mystery in it.”

It is a private, inverted version of everything the corset conversation was about. Online, in fashion, in front of a camera, he has spent a career helping people build the structure that lets them be seen the way they choose. On canvas, alone, he does the opposite as he studies someone until he understands what is underneath their own presentation, and paints that.

Which brings the conversation, inevitably, back to where it started — to the line he offered before I had asked anything at all. “When you undress as a person and show yourself as you are, you are left naked.” The corset comes off. What is underneath was always there, waiting on the other side of the shaping. “If the people before whom you have undressed accept you as you are,” he says, “then you do not need that corset. It was unnecessary to create such an image of yourself.”

It is a generous theory of exposure — that the risk of being seen without the structure is outweighed by what is on the other side of it, if you are brave enough, or simply tired enough, to take the corset off in front of the right people.

I find Ivelina Choeva-Kadieva, Bulgaria’s diamond in the modelling industry, at the very beginning of the summer, relaxing in the quiet of her home. She is avoiding the sun and the heat, not because she insists on keeping her skin snowy white, but because she is carrying a new life in her body.

Ivelina calls this stage of her life an amusement park with a visible spark in her eyes — carousels, little cars, we bump into each other, we fall, we get up.

That is a strange thing to hear from a woman who has spent most of her life being measured.

At thirteen, she left Haskovo for Milan on a pink airplane, carrying a pink Bulgarian-English phrasebook in her bag, “in case something happened,” she says. Nothing in her childhood had initially pointed toward runways and spotlights. She had a strict mother, and Ivelina was following the blueprint of the perfect student, her grades had to stay perfect, too, and she was even attending mathematics competitions.

Everything, she tells me, went inside her notebook. “This is my current notebook; I have many others.” She is organized, neat, and tidy, and it is actually not surprising. Her entire self was built on precision, considering that a model’s body is watched and documented. It is part of a model’s grammar.

Ninety centimeters here, not ninety-two. A girl that is 1.85 meters tall and a girl of 1.75 meters height are held to the same number anyway, because the industry rarely bothers to ask whether its arithmetic is fair.

So how does a woman built on precision arrive a little more than a decade later at a life, resembling an amusement park?

That is where this conversation actually starts.

She tells me that the years before her pregnancy were not calm. She and her husband, actor and TV presenter Aleksandar Kadiev, were — in her words — “in a hundred places at once.” Somewhere underneath the busyness of it all, they were beginning to try for a baby, and there was the belief, as she jokingly says, that this too could have gone into the notebook, checked off like everything else.

“I had always imagined it would happen quickly,” she says. “Or that it would just happen, without planning it so much.”

When it did not, the stress began to take up more and more space. The pressure became internal, too, outside the chaos of day-to-day life. Every morning, she found herself thinking about the same thing.

People around her kept offering the least helpful piece of advice anyone would like to hear while they are inside the experience: calm down.

“At some point, I got tired of worrying,” she says. “I said to myself: Fine. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. I couldn’t do it anymore. I was exhausted.”

And yet, with time, she arrived at the lesson everyone had been trying to give her, not by waking up feeling enlightened on a nice morning, but because she had no other choice.

“I see it as a lesson from fate and as a life lesson — that I cannot control everything,” she says. “And the moment I somehow let go of control, it happened.”

I ask her why she thinks people still refer to pregnancy as something beautiful and natural, but rarely talk about the struggles some women go through. She tells me that everybody around her talks openly about that and she is in a no-filter circle, that was always supporting her, but there was a loneliness underneath it all that no amount of support could fully reach.

“No matter how much you share with someone — even with my husband, who is in this with me — you start to feel lonely,” she says. “Because, after all, you are waiting for something to happen inside you.”

Support, then, becomes essential not because it removes the loneliness completely, but because it makes the loneliness survivable.

“Support is very, very important,” she dives deeper. “The most important thing is to calm down, yes, but you cannot calm down if you don’t have the kind of support that makes you feel safe.”

Pregnancy, for Choeva, has not erased the old vocabulary of modeling, but is teaching her to replace it.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” she says. “I have 10 to 12 years of experience as a professional model, and I think that has a huge influence. I’m used to looking a certain way.”

Now her body is changing. She knows this is normal. Still, there are moments, “I get out of the shower, I see this, I see that,” she says, half-laughing at herself.

Her eye is trained, and her questions are actually not irrational, because inside them lives the history of an industry.

“Have I gained too much weight? Is this new here?”

Her husband, she says, laughs at the questions, too, because his eyes have not changed, even if her body has started to. “In his eyes I see that he still likes me very much and loves me very much. That gives me security and calm.”

She is learning to meet the change with admiration instead of measurements — to stop translating her body into the vocabulary that she has absorbed, because old grammar disappears slowly.

But Choeva does not dramatize the old grammar - she does not perform suffering for the sake of story, nor does she pretend that modeling is a uniquely tragic profession. She is just honest about the industry and its requirements. It is a job, and if you would like to do it, then you have to meet the requirements.

“To work as a model, you have to be within certain measurements,” she says. “My body is the kind that, if I eat, I gain weight — I’m not one of those stick-thin girls.”

In her teenage years, when the body naturally begins to change and form, those changes collided with professional expectations. There were several years, she says, when she did “terrible things” with diets and not eating. She sees it now as a mistake.

“The industry doesn’t care very much about how you feel,” she says. “What matters is being within the measurements.”

Still, guided by resilience, her story is one of curiosity, independence, discipline, friendship, and taste.

After she received the offer for a contract in Milan when she was 13, she saw that as a great way to make her life more interesting.

“I was like: There it is. The gods, the stars, this is it,” she says. “I couldn’t believe it.”

More contracts followed — Asia, Europe, the United States — while she continued her education independently and returned to Haskovo once a year to pass her exams, still having to keep up to the image of the perfect student.

“I had no real idea what the world was like,” she says of that first Milan trip. “I was simply endlessly interested. I was like a sponge. I wanted to touch everything, talk to everyone, hear every story, learn everything.”

There was glamour, of course, but not always in the way people imagine.

“Glamour is what you see in magazines,” she says. The rest could be crowded apartments, tiny rooms, strange cities, shared space, early call times, and constant motion. In Tokyo, she remembers rooms so small that “you take one or two steps and that’s the width,” with three girls inside.

But none of it bothered her much. She wanted something to happen. She wanted life to open.

“For me, it wasn’t important where I slept or what I ate,” she says. “I wanted something to be happening around me.”

The industry gave her independence. Discipline. A sense of beauty. A feeling for style and behavior. It also gave her an early education in the relativity of beauty — perhaps one of the most interesting parts of her story.

When she started modeling, Bulgaria was beginning to embrace artificial glamour - thin eyebrows, crimped hair, Botox, silicone. But the modeling environment around her valued something completely different - clean skin, clean hair, no makeup, naturalness, imperfections, irregularity.

“Girls with more irregular features were considered more interesting because they were more unconventional,” she says.

This is where the Bulgarian gaze and the fashion gaze began to separate.

Choeva mentions that her eyes can appear asymmetrical in some shots, as if she is slightly cross-eyed. In Bulgaria, as she became more recognizable, online comments mocked her for it.

“Who is that cross-eyed girl? What Vogue? Super ugly.”

What others treated as a flaw, the fashion world had treated as an asset.

The industry that measured her hips to the centimeter, was the same industry that hired her eventually for a Vogue Ukraine cover — because of the one thing her own country called a flaw.

“I have been hired and paid precisely because of that imperfection,” she says, “because someone somewhere found it beautiful. You can’t insult me by saying that.”

By the end of our conversation, beauty has become our main topic, larger than image. Choeva speaks about wanting her son to have a sense of beauty — not only female beauty, but the beauty of the world.

“Beauty is not a science,” she says.

Which may be why, when I ask how she would describe this exact stage of her life — no longer counting, no longer measuring against anyone else’s number — she does not reach for a statistic at all.

“An amusement park,” she says.

There are carousels, little cars, collisions, falls, getting back up. Colors everywhere. Something is always sparkling, something is always happening. It is busy, she says, but “mega cool.” She feels like a child in an amusement park.

It is a lovely answer, but also revealing.

After years in an industry where the body could be reduced to centimeters, Ivelina now describes her life not through the perfect lines or fixed measurements, but through movement and color, which is not a number someone else can approve.

Perhaps this is the new grammar she is learning now - a body changing, a child coming, a woman extending her knowledge of her own beauty.

Not the grammar of centimeters.

The grammar of wonder.

This feature is based on Ivan Ssavsski’s video interview with Ivelina Choeva, originally conducted in Bulgarian for The Wonder Mag. The full conversation is available on YouTube.