What is the 2018 alternative to the traditional nuclear family? Rio Uribe of Gypsy Sport has a particularly compelling answer. Backstage at the label’s Fall show, the Clermont twins—fresh off Yeezy’s viral Kim-clone Instagram drop—smiled into passing cameras as curling irons twirled around their mile-long platinum hair. Across the room, 10-year-old Desmond Napoles, the wunderkind drag kid, sat for a black-and-white manicure. Lanky guys with beaded dreads, buzz-cut women with tattoos, a model nursing her weeks-old infant…the scene felt like a rollicking, warm-hearted reunion, never mind if half the cast was scouted at a party on Monday. For the trans activist Munroe Bergdorf, who closed the show in an ombré pink wig, her catwalk debut took on special meaning in such company. “To walk for a brand like Gypsy Sport, who is completely along the same lines as my politics and all about empowerment and redefining beauty, that’s what I’m about.”

Only it wasn’t just her catwalk debut: Three weeks ago, the Londoner underwent facial feminization surgery, and her trip to New York has been a back-to-back marathon of first-look photo shoots and appearances. When she revealed the news to her Instagram followers five days ago (12,000 likes and counting), she posted an earnest message about the “weight that has been lifted” following a long struggle with gender dysmorphia. “Now for the next chapter,” she said. And how better to turn the page than with showstopping hair?

“I debuted my new look with the pink [wig] because I wanted something fun,” Bergdorf explained, minutes after hairstylist Laurent Philippon gently coaxed the front pieces into face-framing wings. She paid a visit to Edmund Bossman’s studio in London’s Walthamstow neighborhood, where “it’s just wigs and wigs and wigs on the wall. He does Stefflon Don, Ms Banks—all the rap girls and black female celebrities go to him,” Bergdorf said, explaining an initial plan to go platinum. That is, until she saw her. “The wig—I refer to her as her, like she’s an extension of me,” she said with a laugh. “It’s a bit much, but it’s just enough. Go big or go home, you know?”

That telegraphed confidence has been hard-won, Bergdorf confessed, describing how she has overcome early struggles with an eating disorder and depression. While therapy has been instrumental in her self-discovery—“I don’t feel like you can be yourself until you understand how you got to where you are”—she is just as quick to credit her own idiosyncratic strategies. “I’ll show you something funny,” she teased, pulling a hunk of rose quartz out of her pocket, an uncanny match to her blush-pink nails and hair. “Before I left London, I put crystals in every single one of my outfits,” she said, detailing a rotation that includes labradorite, fluorite, and selenite, “the ones that really help me in transitional periods and elevate my spirit. The whole witchy vibe is what I’m all about."