Selah Dor Was Based in Boston. I Found It by Accident. That Was the Point.

I found Selah Dor because Aspiring Couture wrote about it first. That's how discovery worked in 2009. You followed bloggers whose taste you trusted and they led you somewhere new. It wasn't an algorithm. It was a person making a choice.

David Chum's collection — Selah Dor, based in Massachusetts — was exactly the kind of thing I would have missed without that handoff. Boston was not on the fashion map in any serious way. Designers here were invisible to the national conversation unless they'd moved to New York or gotten lucky with a specific kind of press.

The clothes were wearable, which sounds like faint praise but isn't. I specifically wrote that I loved the Linda skirt and might splurge. That's the test. Not "this is interesting from a design perspective." Would I buy it. The answer was yes.

Chum's aesthetic was precise. Clean lines, considered construction. The kind of thing that doesn't date because it never chased a trend to begin with.

In 2009 I was thinking about this purely in terms of taste. I liked it. I told people.

In 2026 I'd think about it differently. The regional designer question has legal dimensions now that it didn't then. Massachusetts has been developing its own set of AI and digital commerce regulations that affect small fashion brands operating here. The FTC's influencer disclosure rules — which didn't exist when Aspiring Couture tipped me to Selah Dor — now govern exactly that kind of blog-to-blog recommendation.

The discovery pipeline that found this brand in 2009 is now regulated at multiple points. That's not necessarily bad. Some of the regulation is genuinely protective of consumers and designers both. But it changes what it means to write about a small brand, and it changes what it means to be one.

Selah Dor was good. I hope David Chum is still making things somewhere.

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Not legal advice. This is editorial analysis for informational purposes. Consult qualified legal counsel for your specific situation.