Prabal Gurung Tapped Spiritune to Guide His Runway Music's Emotional Resonance

During New York Fashion Week, it’s always all about the clothes—and yet it isn’t. In the coming months, the collection that debuted during fashion designer Prabal Gurung’s spring summer 2026 runway show, titled “Angels in America,” will find its place in boutiques and on bodies around the world. And yet, the stirring presentation itself—held within the halls of Manhattan’s St. Bartholomew’s Church—will linger in the imaginations of those who attended. Coupled with the flowing silhouettes, floral references, and shimmering satins, a live choir performance led by acclaimed composer and pianist Chloe Flower, and guided by the neuroscience-based mental wellness and music platform Spiritune, lifted attendees into a satisfying, ethereal emotional arc.

“Spiritune exists to show the world how music can be more than entertainment,” Jamie Pabst, the music therapy app’s CEO and founder, shares with Surface, “it can be a tool for emotional well-being, connection, and even transcendence. Music unlocks our deepest emotions—joy, awe, and wonder—and in doing so, helps us thrive.” Pabst met Gurung at a Lunar New Year celebration in 2024. They spoke of their creative processes—his being one of emotional intent through fashion design, Spiritune’s being about music design for emotional direction. Collaboration seemed natural.

“My shows have always been more than just fashion; they are an emotional architecture, built stitch by stitch, light by light, and note by note,” Gurung tells Surface. “‘Angels in America’ was born out of a very personal question: how do we find hope when the world feels fractured, and who are the angels that walk among us when we need them most?” For the fashion designer, “angels are not celestial beings in clouds; they are the outsiders, the dreamers, the queer, the defiant, the ones who continue to rise and bloom even when told to stay small, and the ones who empower those to be unabashedly true to themselves.”

Gurung started working on this collection while he was on a book tour promoting his memoir, Walk Like a Girl. “As with most of our collections, I design and use our runway as a platform to reframe traditional notions of what it means to identify or be a certain way, often playing on duality,” he continues. “The Angel’s Trumpet flower that inspired this collection carries that same duality—beautiful, intoxicating, dangerous, sacred. It taught me that contradictions do not diminish divinity; they reveal it.”

Regarding a soundtrack’s ability to enhance the meaningfulness of a runway show, he says that “we wanted to push the music even further this season.” With Flower, his longtime friend, alongside Spiritune, he adds, “we were able to create a powerful soundtrack that enables the sound and musical experience to connect back to how our brain processes and receives this. I have the chills just thinking about it…how powerful that we can actually use this as an opportunity for healing and transcendence?” Flower arranged choral renditions of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” and accompanied to choir on piano alongside Anna Lapwood on organ. The live music washed over attendees.

“The scientific guidance behind the show’s musical constructs draws on the biology of vocal expression, the neuroscience of rhythm, and their many links to how music makes us feel,” neuroscientist Dan Bowling—scientific co-founder of Spiritune and director of the Music & Health Lab at Stanford School of Medicine—tells Surface. “When science and art converge in this way—as they have in this collaboration between Spiritune, Prabal, Chloe, and myself—the result is deeper expression and understanding. It creates a synergy between what art reveals about our highest hopes and dreams, and what science explains about their origins and how we might realize them.”