Beginnings
There are certain photographs that exist so continuously within a family that they begin to feel less like singular images and more like part of the emotional architecture of your life. Long before I ever thought about fashion design, textile motifs, or House of Caswell, there was a small wedding photograph of my parents taken on April 13, 1973, one that I grew up seeing in their wedding album for so many years that it would eventually shape so much of the visual and emotional language I would later become drawn to.
In the photograph, my mom is embracing my dad after their wedding ceremony, smiling directly at the camera with one eye closed in mid-wink while holding their certificate of marriage against the back of his black tuxedo jacket. Her bouquet of white daisies and pink roses spills across the image, and the entire photograph is softened by the warm, faded color palette that old family photos often carry with them over time.
Years later, that photograph became the foundation for 4/13/73, the second House of Caswell collection.
There is no official launch date for the collection yet, but I have always believed that a collection begins long before the clothing itself is released, at least a House of Caswell or Berried Alive collection does. It begins with a narrative, with a world, with a set of emotions and symbols that slowly gather meaning over time, and this journal entry feels like the beginning of telling that story properly.
The Painting
The first piece of 4/13/73 was not a garment at all, but a painting.
In 2024, my mom underwent brain surgery to remove a tumor, and although the surgery was successful, the experience was deeply frightening for our entire family and brought back many of the same emotions we experienced when my dad passed away from pancreatic cancer when I was eighteen. My family has always been extraordinarily close, and losing my dad devastated all of us because we loved him so deeply, so when my mom became seriously ill years later, it reopened that same fear of losing someone who feels inseparable from your understanding of home, love, and identity.
Around that time, I found myself returning emotionally to old family photographs, especially images of my parents together when they were young, and I became increasingly drawn to that wedding photo from 1973. There was something about the warmth in it, the tenderness of it, and the visible joy in my mother’s expression that felt almost impossible to stop looking at once I began studying it closely.
I decided to create a pastel painting inspired by the photograph as a birthday gift for my mom.
The process became emotional very quickly because I was not simply recreating an image, I was spending time inside a memory that belonged to my family, paying attention to details I had never fully noticed before, like the exact softness of the bouquet petals, the seams and details of my mom’s dress, the fuzz of my dad’s curly hair, and the contrast of the flowers against my dad’s dark tuxedo jacket.
As I worked on the painting, I realized I was trying to preserve more than the image itself. I was trying to preserve a feeling.
While working on the painting, I became deeply interested in the color palettes that appeared throughout photographs, interiors, advertisements, and printed materials from the early 1970s, especially the softened yellows, oxidized browns, faded aquas, muted pinks, and pale greens that seemed to carry the atmosphere of the decade inside them. I intentionally limited myself to an extremely small palette of pastel colors while painting, blending pigments directly onto the paper to create subtle shifts in tone rather than relying on a large range of individual sticks, because I wanted the image to feel the way memory itself often feels to me: slightly softened at the edges, compressed into a handful of emotional tones that somehow still contain enormous complexity inside them.
Art, Family, and Inheritance
My mom was the first person who truly encouraged my love of art.
She loved drawing and painting herself when she was younger and encouraged me to spend much of my childhood immersed in creative hobbies, especially scrapbooking, crafting, and of course my fashion drawings. Creativity was never treated as something impractical or unnecessary while I was growing up. It was simply part of life, woven naturally into our home and our routines, and looking back now, I can see how much that environment shaped the way I eventually came to understand art and design myself.
I have hundreds of memories of going to the photo shop with my mom to have her latest rolls of film developed, then hurrying home so she could painstakingly write the dates and names of everyone in each photo on the back with a Sharpie before the details of the moment could fade from memory, carefully sliding each photograph into the clear plastic sleeves of a photo album once she was finished.
For especially meaningful photos, she would cut them into decorative shapes and transform them into elaborate scrapbook pages layered with patterned paper, handwritten captions, glitter, rhinestones, and tiny embellishments that caught the light whenever you turned the page. For my mom, photographs have always meant something far deeper than simple documentation. They are not only a record of her life and the lives of the people she loves, but also a creative practice in themselves, a way of preserving emotion, assigning meaning to moments, and transforming memory into something physical that can be returned to over and over again. Looking back now, I think many of the ideas that eventually became central to House of Caswell began there, especially this instinct I have always had to treat objects, clothing, imagery, and keepsakes as emotional containers for memory.
Even now, living in Washington while most of my family remains in Minnesota, I still feel profoundly connected to them and to the loving environment I grew up inside. My family supports everything I create, every strange idea and every artistic risk, and in many ways 4/13/73 feels inseparable from that support system because the collection itself grew directly out of my relationships with them.
Building the World of 4/13/73
While working on the painting, I slowly began developing the broader visual language that would eventually become 4/13/73.
I started researching 1970s weddings extensively, collecting photographs of bridal parties, vintage bridesmaid dresses, floral wallpaper, retro upholstery, plaid suiting, scrapbooks, and faded family snapshots from the era. What fascinated me most was the emotional warmth of everything. The colors were soft and slightly muted, the florals felt romantic without appearing overly polished, and even the more graphic patterns still carried a sense of intimacy and familiarity to them.
I knew very early on that I did not want the collection to feel costume-like or overly referential to the 1970s. I wanted it to feel the way memory itself feels, softened around the edges, emotionally warm, nostalgic without becoming theatrical.
The original wedding photograph naturally became the center of the collection’s color palette. The frosted aqua tones inspired many of the blues throughout the collection, while the daisies introduced warm buttery yellows and soft creams, and the bouquet roses introduced dusty pinks and muted coral tones that eventually carried across multiple garments and patterns.
At the same time, another meaningful thing happened during the early stages of the project.
For my birthday, my sister Stacie gave me a stylus paintbrush for my iPad, and during the plane ride home to Washington after celebrating with my family in Minnesota, I began experimenting with watercolor-style digital florals inspired directly by my mother’s bouquet from the wedding photograph. I created soft illustrations of pink roses and white daisies tied together with aqua ribbon bows, and those watercolor florals eventually evolved into some of the earliest motifs used throughout the collection, and even an actual aqua bow on the neck of the Connie dress.
Looking back now, it feels strangely fitting that so much of the collection was shaped collaboratively through family, even unintentionally. A gift from my sister became part of the design process for a collection inspired by my parents, while my mother’s creativity and encouragement remained present throughout the emotional foundation of the project itself.
Carrying the Story Forward
As the collection expanded, I realized I wanted 4/13/73 to feel larger than a single dress or print. I wanted it to feel like an entire emotional world, one built through recurring motifs, coordinated palettes, symbolic references, and garments that all spoke to one another through a shared narrative language.
I began creating repeating patterns inspired by bridal bouquets, engagement rings, plaid suiting, retro geometric prints, granny squares, floral wallpaper, and vintage textile motifs from the 1970s, all tied together through the same palette developed from the original painting and photograph. The collection gradually became a conversation between family history, memory, art, and fashion, where each garment felt connected to the same emotional origin point even when interpreted through completely different silhouettes or pattern styles.
Because the collection is rooted so deeply in family, every piece within 4/13/73 will be named after my parents and members of their wedding party, preserving their names inside the collection itself and allowing them to continue existing within the evolving world of the House.
Forty years after my parent’s wedding, Charlie and I recreated my parents’ wedding photograph on our own wedding day, recreating the embrace, the wink, and the positioning of the marriage certificate. Looking back at this recreated image feels surreal now and unexpectedly emotional because it reveals something I had already been exploring subconsciously throughout the entire development of the collection, which is the idea that certain symbols, emotions, and gestures continue repeating themselves across generations in slightly different forms.
In many ways, that repetition is what 4/13/73 is truly about.
The collection explores memory not as something static or distant, but as something living that continues reshaping itself across time through photographs, objects, relationships, clothing, stories, and acts of creation.
An Invitation
As 4/13/73 continues to evolve, I will be sharing more of the artwork, process imagery, collection development, symbolism, and personal stories that shaped the collection long before the garments themselves were finalized.
If these ideas resonate with you, not simply as fashion but as a way of understanding memory, family, creativity, and adornment as interconnected forms of storytelling, I invite you to join the Collector’s List.
I share new journal entries, collection updates, behind-the-scenes process work, and the evolving ideas behind House of Caswell, exploring clothing as memory, authorship, and emotional preservation through wearable art.
