The post went up Monday on the official Instagram and Facebook accounts of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It featured Pono Skousen, a fashion designer in New York City. He talked about growing up around women, about designing clothes that help women feel strong, about faith showing up in his work in quiet ways. "Clothes can tell stories. They can carry light," he said.
The post did not say that Skousen is gay. It did not say that he has a boyfriend or that he attends church every Sunday. And it did not say that months earlier he had co-founded a clothing label called Church of Martin, which sells a shirt of two women kissing under the words Love One Another and calls itself "the brand that struggles with same-sex attraction."
Members found the label within hours. One commenter asked the church to act saintly. Another asked why people were leaving hate under a post about a member who wants to belong. By Wednesday, the story was in The Salt Lake Tribune, the Cougar Chronicle, and the national LGBTQ press.
Skousen told Queerty that the interview was filmed more than a year before it was published, and that the Church of Martin did not exist when the cameras rolled. He and co-founder Charles Robertson launched the label months later, while the footage sat in production. The church filmed one version of Skousen's life and published it in another.
Skousen grew up in Hawaii, where Relief Society sisters taught him to sew, and his path from there runs through the Miami City Ballet's pre-professional program at 15, a two-year mission across North and South America, the wardrobe department of the church's own Book of Mormon Videos project, and a 20-look student runway show he staged inside the Manhattan chapel near Lincoln Center. He read the Book of Mormon cover to cover for the first time on that video set and said the experience gave him a testimony. LDS Living, the magazine owned by the church's Deseret Book, profiled him in 2023. An early Parsons project, still on his student portfolio, was a scripture briefcase. He built it because he thought the scripture bags available to members were ugly, and photographed it in the pews on Easter Sunday.
The professional credits hold up. Skousen graduated from Parsons in 2025 and showed his thesis collection in the school's BFA runway show. At Who Decides War, the New York label founded by Virgil Abloh protégé Everard Best, he helped design and construct 2025 Met Gala looks worn by Regina King, Jazmine Sullivan, and Danielle Deadwyler. He won The Met Fashion Competition. And until recently, according to his LinkedIn, he served as second counselor in the bishopric of the Union Square YSA Ward. He held a leadership calling in a Manhattan congregation during roughly the same months he was launching Church of Martin.
The label itself is small. In early July, it had slightly more than 350 Instagram followers, one of them Charlie Bird, the former BYU Cosmo the Cougar. The catalog includes the Love One Another shirt, an I Love My Mormon Boy tee, pieces styled after pioneer women's dresses, scripture cases, and a June collection built on the Boy Scouts of America, including a Gay Scouts of America hoodie. The church chartered the Scouts for a century before ending the relationship in 2019.
The Cougar Chronicle reads the catalog as a mockery of sacred things. The founders describe it as reclaiming a past with joy rather than resentment. Skousen told Queerty he grew up familiar with criticism from both sides, that the label is a silly fashion brand rather than an anti-Mormon statement, and that he does not want to become a culture war symbol. No one in the coverage has explained why it is called Martin. No one appears to have asked.
Whatever the label means, the church's handling of it fits a pattern. In April, the church posted the story of a man named Nate who deferred to his wife's career. Some members read the post as a soft critique of the Family Proclamation, and the backlash on X grew loud enough that the account locked the post from further comments. The Skousen story never went to X at all. It ran only on Instagram and Facebook. In March 2024, a church Instagram post quoting Relief Society leader J. Anette Dennis on women's authority drew more than 8,000 comments, most from active Latter-day Saint women disputing the claim. When a Meta glitch made the comments vanish for hours, Exponent II began archiving them in case they never came back.
The member profile is an old form. The "I'm a Mormon" campaign ran through the 2010s and cast surfers, scientists, and artists to show the faith was bigger than its stereotype. President Russell M. Nelson directed the church away from the word Mormon in 2018, and the campaign went with it, but the format survived on the church's social accounts. Skousen, a Hawaiian ballet dancer turned Parsons designer, is the kind of member the format was built to find. The format was built to reach people outside the church. The comment sections it produces are now full of people inside it.
The church has said nothing. As of Wednesday, no removal of the post had been reported. Skousen has said he understands why some members might be upset and that he is at peace with that. On Sunday, he will be in church.
