Visibility
At some point recently, wearing rich, saturated, or even neon color started to make people feel less sophisticated. It became aesthetically acceptable to wear only beige, white, black, or other neutrals, and over time those palettes began to represent a kind of visual restraint associated with tastefulness, minimalism, calmness, and composure. Meanwhile, wearing bold color increasingly became associated with childishness, excess, or the idea that someone did not know how to dress themselves “properly.”
But historically, this way of thinking is incredibly recent.
For most of human history, people pursued color obsessively. Entire economies, trade routes, and artistic movements were shaped by the desire for richer dyes and more vibrant pigments. Royalty wore garments dyed purple using sea snails because color itself signified status and rarity. Europe became consumed with cochineal red after colonization introduced the dye from the Americas. During the Victorian era, people decorated themselves and their homes in Scheele’s green despite the fact that it contained arsenic. Even ancient civilizations became inseparable from their signature pigments, like the deep blue so closely associated with Egyptian art and decoration.
Human beings have always wanted color around them.
We have always wanted to enrich our clothing, homes, paintings, interiors, keepsakes, and ceremonies with it. Throughout history, color often represented luxury, emotion, celebration, artistry, identity, spirituality, or social belonging. So when I look at the overwhelming neutrality that dominates so much contemporary fashion and interior design now, I do not really see it as the natural state of human taste. I see it as something culturally specific to this particular moment in time.
There are many theories as to why this happened. Some people describe the rise of beige minimalism as a response to the anxiety and overstimulation that followed the pandemic, where people began craving environments that felt calming, quiet, and emotionally controlled. Others frame it through the lens of “quiet luxury,” where visual restraint became associated with sophistication and wealth, especially in reaction to the louder branding, maximalism, and logomania that dominated earlier decades.
And I think both explanations are probably true to some extent, but underneath all of that I think something more emotional is happening too.
When neutral dressing becomes socially associated with tastefulness, wearing vibrant color begins to carry a certain amount of risk. Standing out visually becomes vulnerable. It becomes easier to blend in than to express yourself openly, especially in a culture where so many people are terrified of appearing embarrassing, excessive, or attention-seeking.
Being a maximalist in a world of white and beige can feel emotionally exposing and vulnerable.
Living in Color
I have always loved dressing colorfully, although that does not mean I dislike neutrals or believe they have no place emotionally or artistically.
Long before House of Caswell existed, color had already shaped how I understood myself creatively.
Charlie and I spent years building the visual world of Berried Alive around extremely vibrant colors, often using combinations that felt intentionally excessive, playful, surreal, or almost candy-like in their saturation. That was never accidental. Many people discover the band through metal, goth, or alternative communities where black dominates visually and seriousness is often associated with restraint, but that never really reflected who we were artistically.
We are not goth, and we are not really metalheads in the cultural sense either. The music itself constantly moves between emotional registers, genres, melodies, textures, and moods, so building a monochrome visual identity around it never felt emotionally honest to me. The colors existed because the music itself already felt colorful.
For many people arriving from darker visual worlds, I think those colors became a kind of emotional release. A reminder that intensity does not require the absence of brightness, softness, humor, sweetness, or play.
Because of that, I have spent years quite literally living in color.
Much of my wardrobe consists of Berried Alive and House of Caswell samples, both produced pieces and prototypes that never entered production, so my daily life is genuinely surrounded by saturated color and pattern. And over time, I began noticing how deeply color affects the way people feel physically and emotionally. Certain colors change the complexion entirely. They reflect warmth back onto the skin, brighten the eyes, soften shadows, or create energy around the face and body.
And once you begin noticing those shifts, it becomes difficult to stop seeing them.
Learning to See Color
At the same time, I have slowly trained myself to see color more closely over the years.
I still take weekly pastel painting classes with Barbara Sheehan, who is an incredible artist, and through painting I began understanding color in a completely different way than I had before. When I look at a person now, I do not simply see skin tone. I see undertones, greens, blues, purples, reds, yellows, warmth and coolness shifting constantly depending on light, shadow, fabric, and surrounding color relationships.
Shadows do not simply darken things, they transform color entirely. There are both cool and warm shadows.
I spend an enormous amount of time comparing tones against one another, watching how colors intensify, soften, vibrate, or neutralize each other depending on placement and proportion. Charlie would probably tell you that one of my greatest joys in life is discovering two completely unrelated objects that happen to match perfectly in color. It makes me disproportionately happy every single time.
I also consider myself part of the online color maximalist community in many ways. I follow countless artists, stylists, designers, and creators whose work celebrates color unapologetically, and I genuinely admire the openness and courage that kind of visual expression often requires now.
At the same time, I have noticed a recurring phrase within some maximalist spaces that I have never fully connected with: “rage against the beige.”
And honestly, I do not entirely understand it.
Beige, Memory, and Emotional Context
After all, beige is still a color.
I do not think beige should dominate every wardrobe, interior, or collection exclusively, but I also do not think color itself exists morally. Context, emotion, and memory can all change meaning over time. Haven’t we all heard the old adage by now that not so long ago pink used to be a boy’s color and blue was for girls?
In 4/13/73, the second House of Caswell collection, beige (albeit a floral-printed beige) actually became one of the most important tones within the palette. The collection was inspired by a pastel painting I created of my parents on their wedding day in 1973, itself based on an old family photograph that had gradually shifted in color over decades of age and handling. My mother’s white wedding dress no longer appeared purely white in the photograph. Time had softened it into warmer ivory and beige tones, and when I recreated the image in pastel, I mixed incredibly pale greens, soft peachy pinks, and muted yellows together in order to recreate the emotional atmosphere of the photograph accurately.
Technically, I was not even using beige pigment at all. The beige emerged through layering and blending color.
And once those softened tones entered the painting, they naturally became part of the broader emotional palette of the collection itself. Even though 4/13/73 contains many pastel blues, peaches, yellows, pinks, greens, and florals, that warmer neutral shade still remains foundational to the emotional atmosphere of the garments because it belonged to the memory the collection originated from.
That is why I have never fully related to the idea that maximalism requires rejecting neutrals entirely.
Color is emotional because context is emotional.
A faded beige inside an old family photograph carries an entirely different feeling than a beige room designed purely to appear trend-conscious or emotionally detached. One feels like memory. The other can sometimes feel like avoidance. And those distinctions matter to me.
Building a World Through Color
For Still Life, the entire collection emerged from an eight-color palette developed directly from the original pastel painting that inspired the collection itself. As with 4/13/73, the artwork came first.
Long before silhouettes, prints, or garments existed, the emotional atmosphere already existed inside the painting, and the colors carried that atmosphere before anything else did. In order to better understand the painting visually, I began reducing it digitally into smaller and smaller color groupings, experimenting with what happened emotionally as the palette simplified itself.
At one point, I reduced the artwork down to eight colors and slightly increased the saturation, and that’s when everything suddenly became clearer.
It did not feel like the painting had lost complexity. It felt distilled somehow, like the emotional core of the image had finally revealed itself more directly. Those eight colors eventually became the backbone of the entire collection, grounding every repeating print, every pattern variation, every fabric choice, and every visual decision that followed.
I followed a very similar process while developing 4/13/73, intentionally restricting the palette from the beginning around softened seventies tones, earthy greens, peaches, baby blues, creams, faded floral shades, and the deeper plum-brown inspired by my father’s tuxedo in the original wedding photograph.
Because of that, color styling begins for me at the level of the collection first.
The palette becomes the emotional world everything exists inside, and then each garment develops its own relationship to that world, sometimes harmonizing completely, sometimes introducing tension, contrast, or interruption, but always speaking the same emotional language.
In that sense, color becomes another form of storytelling entirely.
Just as notes inside a musical key shape the emotional atmosphere of a song, the colors inside a garment or collection shape the emotional atmosphere surrounding memory, identity, and experience.
Memory, Presence, and Taking Up Space
Memory itself feels layered to me.
And I believe color exists inside those layers whether we consciously notice it or not. The clothing touching the body during a moment, the colors surrounding a particular experience, the tones inside a room, the shade of the sky, the warmth or coolness of fabric against skin, all of those things quietly attach themselves to memory.
That is part of why I sometimes wonder what happens emotionally when someone spends their entire life trying not to stand out visually at all. If every memory becomes attached to the same emotional neutrality over and over again, does life eventually begin to blur into a single uninterrupted tone? Does avoiding visibility eventually become its own kind of emotional flattening?
I do think many people are afraid of taking up space visually.
There is often pressure now to appear effortless, restrained, unaffected, minimal, emotionally controlled. But personally, I think putting effort into dressing can be a profound act of self-respect and self-love. Choosing colors because they make you feel something, layering prints because they create emotion, selecting accessories and textures carefully because they complete a world you want to inhabit for the day, all of that reflects care, imagination, and emotional presence.
Colorful clothing is not “too much” simply because it is visible.
And even though I design with neutrals sometimes when they belong emotionally within a collection, I still reject the idea that sophistication requires visual restraint. I think color allows people to feel emotionally present inside their own lives. I think it allows memory to remain textured rather than flattened. I think it creates atmosphere around ordinary experiences and transforms dressing into something more intimate and expressive than simple functionality.
No matter the palette of the collection I am currently building, my goal has always remained the same: I want to create garments that make people feel something.
Whether that feeling is joy, nostalgia, softness, melancholy, confidence, whimsy, or reflection, I want the colors and prints to create emotional presence around the person wearing them, because to me, clothing has never simply been about covering the body.
It has always been about shaping the emotional world surrounding it.
An Invitation
As House of Caswell continues evolving, I will be sharing more of the artwork, palette studies, process imagery, symbolism, collection development, and personal reflections that shape each collection long before the garments themselves fully exist.
If these ideas resonate with you, not simply as fashion but as a way of understanding memory, emotion, visibility, creativity, and adornment as interconnected forms of storytelling, I invite you to join the Collector’s List.
I share new journal entries, behind-the-scenes process work, collection updates, visual research, and the evolving philosophy behind House of Caswell, exploring clothing as emotional presence, authorship, memory, and wearable art.