The First Monday in May
Every year, I look forward to the first Monday in May.
For many people it is simply the night of the Met Gala. For those of us who love fashion, it’s the Super Bowl of Instagram. I spend all day refreshing my feed to see images of designers, artists, and celebrities interpreting the year’s theme through clothing that often blurs the line between garment and spectacle.
This year’s theme, “Fashion Is Art,” is particularly exciting to me. Not only because I’m eager to see the costumes that will appear on the steps of the Met, but because the conversation itself sits at the center of the work I have been building with House of Caswell.
For some designers, the Met Gala theme will serve as a creative prompt. A moment to experiment with sculptural silhouettes, elaborate references, or garments that behave like installations. But for me, the idea that fashion might be art was never a theme.
It was the starting point.
The Old Argument
The debate over whether fashion is art is not new. For centuries, museums have treated clothing as something adjacent to art rather than equal to it. A dress might be a beautiful object, perhaps, but one tied too closely to commerce, practicality, and the human body to belong fully within the canon of painting or sculpture.
The only reason the Met Gala exists is to raise money for the Costume Institute’s annual exhibit, because clothing isn’t considered “real” enough art to be automatically included as art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is the only department at The Met which is required to fundraise for itself, in fact.
And yet fashion has always been deeply entangled with the visual arts. In the 20th Century, artists collaborated with designers regularly. Elsa Schiaparelli worked with Salvador Dalí to create garments that blurred the boundary between illusion and object. Vivienne Westwood collaborated with both pop artists like Keith Haring and musicians like the Sex Pistols. And these are just a couple of my personal favorites. A quick search will find you countless examples of art/fashion collaborations, all unique and legitimate works of art.
Clothing has always carried the same creative DNA as art. It reflects the era in which it is made, the sensibility of its creator, and the imagination of the person who chooses to wear it. Fashion is not separate from art. It is simply art that moves.
The Spectacle of Literal Translation
Some designers have explored this connection quite literally.
I still remember watching Jeremy Scott’s Moschino runway shows where models appeared transformed into surrealist or cubist paintings, complete with ornate picture frames framing the garments themselves. The models did not simply wear clothes. They became living canvases.
Those collections were theatrical, playful, and unmistakably Moschino. They treated the runway as a kind of stage where art history could be reinterpreted with humor and exaggeration. I adored them.
But when I began developing House of Caswell, I found myself approaching the same idea from another direction. Instead of turning garments into paintings, I wanted to ask a different question.
What if the painting came first?
From Canvas to Cloth
The first version of the Still Life collection was not clothing, it was a song.
Years ago, I wrote lyrics about letting life become stagnant, like a still life painting where nothing ever changes. Charlie wrote the guitar parts, and together we recorded the track. We even hired a professional harmonica player to record the melody.
When it came time to create the artwork for the single, I decided to try something new.
Until that point, my visual work for Berried Alive had been entirely digital. But the song felt too personal for a purely digital image. I wanted something physical, imperfect, and tactile. So I began taking art lessons and learning to work in pastel. The desire to create that painting was the original reason I started taking art lessons. I’ve continued taking them because I fell in love with the medium of dry pastels and the wonderful community I found with my teacher and fellow students.
I purchased a carnival glass bowl from an antique shop and filled it with fruit, arranging it carefully until the composition felt right. The glass caught the light in shifting iridescent tones, and the fruit softened at the edges as pastel dust layered onto the paper. That painting became the foundation for everything that followed.
When I founded House of Caswell, I started with that same image. Instead of using it merely as inspiration, I translated the painting itself into textile. The colors, gestures, and textures moved from pastel to print, from canvas to cloth. That’s how one artwork became an entire wardrobe.
The Reality of Fashion Today
It is impossible to talk about fashion right now without acknowledging the state of the industry.
We are constantly bombarded with advertisements for clothing produced at astonishing speed and extremely low prices. Designs appear online almost immediately after they debut on a runway, copied and reproduced by companies that profit from the work of artists and designers without participating in the creative process themselves.
The true cost of that speed rarely appears in the advertisement. To make clothing cheaply, someone somewhere is paying the price. Workers labor under impossible conditions, and materials are produced without regard for environmental impact. Garments are worn briefly and discarded just as quickly.
When I started House of Caswell, I knew I did not want to contribute to that system.
Instead, I chose to work within the slow fashion movement. It is a slower and often more difficult path. I cannot release new designs constantly or chase emerging trends.
What I can create are garments that are made thoughtfully, produced in small quantities, and intended to last, clothing that can be repaired and mended rather than thrown away. I design based on the pieces and silhouettes I personally return to year after year, the ones I pack when I go on trips and the ones I reach for repeatedly when I have a special occasion coming up.
Clothing that deserves to exist.
Fashion as a Living Medium
When people say fashion is art, they often imagine garments displayed behind glass in a museum, but fashion possesses a quality that most art forms do not: it moves through the world.
A garment changes depending on the body inside it. The way someone walks, the way fabric catches the light, the memories that accumulate over time as it is worn again and again.
A painting remains where it is hung, but clothing gathers life.
This is why I think of garments less as products and more as companions to experience. They carry stories forward, collecting meaning as they travel through the world with the people who wear them. Fashion is not just art; fashion is art that participates in life.
Artful Nostalgia
At House of Caswell, I describe this philosophy with two words: Artful Nostalgia. The phrase reflects my fascination with memory and the way objects hold emotional resonance over time.
A vintage garment carries traces of previous lives. A photograph captures a moment that can never be recreated. A painting preserves a fleeting arrangement of color and light. When art moves into clothing, something interesting happens. It becomes part of someone else’s story.
Each piece from the Still Life collection is produced in limited numbered editions and accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity. In this way, the garment behaves less like a disposable product and more like a collected artwork. The wearer becomes the final collaborator.
The Met’s upcoming exhibition will explore clothing across centuries of human history, placing garments in dialogue with works of art from across the museum’s collection. It is a reminder that the human body has always been one of art’s most important subjects: paintings depict it, sculptures study it, and photographs frame it. In the same way, fashion dresses it.
If art reflects the human condition, then clothing may be one of the most immediate ways that reflection becomes visible. Every morning, when we choose what to wear, we curate a small exhibition of ourselves. In that sense, fashion is not mere art displayed in a museum. Fashion is art that moves through the world with us, carried on our backs and woven into the stories we'll look back on later when recalling the most formative moments of our lives.
An Invitation
These reflections are part of an ongoing Journal series exploring the intersection of art, fashion, memory, and making.
If you enjoy essays like this one, I invite you to join the Collector’s List, where I share new Journal entries, behind-the-scenes glimpses of my creative process, and reflections on building House of Caswell as a multidisciplinary studio of clothing, art, and sound.
Because fashion, at its most meaningful, is not only something we wear, it is something we collect, remember, and live inside.