Beginnings
Fashion designers rarely begin with the collections that ultimately define them.
Long before a designer develops a recognizable point of view, there are years spent experimenting, making mistakes, following unexpected curiosities, and learning lessons that only become visible in retrospect. Those early projects are often overshadowed by whatever comes later, yet they shape every decision that follows. Looking back, it becomes surprisingly difficult to separate the finished work from everything that taught you how to make it.
Over the past several weeks, while preparing design presentations, I found myself revisiting projects I had not looked at closely in years. I found myself opening old concept boards, factory development files, sketches, tech packs, and presentation decks, retracing a path that eventually led to House of Caswell. What surprised me most was realizing how much of my education as a designer happened before House of Caswell even existed.
One garment in particular kept drawing me back: the Gabriela Satin Hoodie.
If you discovered my work through House of Caswell, you probably associate my design language with original pastel paintings, coordinated prints, satin, silk, and womenswear. The Gabriela Hoodie certainly belongs to that world, yet it also carries another story entirely. Hidden beneath its glossy satin exterior is the history of a completely different collection, one that taught me nearly everything I know about apparel development and shaped the designer I would eventually become.
To understand why the Gabriela Hoodie exists, we first have to go back several years, long before Still Life, to a colorful little progressive metal band called Berried Alive.
When Streetwear Started Feeling Like Home
Although I have always loved fashion in almost every form, streetwear has always held a particularly special place in my heart.
There is something wonderfully democratic about it. Unlike traditional luxury fashion, which can sometimes feel distant or inaccessible, streetwear has always celebrated people who simply decide to start making things. Musicians, skateboarders, graffiti artists, graphic designers, photographers, surfers, illustrators, bloggers, tattoo artists, screen printers, and countless others have all contributed to its history. They may come from completely different creative worlds, but they are united by a shared belief that if something does not exist yet, you can make it yourself.
That philosophy felt immediately familiar.
By 2018, Charlie and I had already spent years building Berried Alive almost entirely through that same mindset. We learned photography so we could create our own promotional images. We taught ourselves videography, creative direction, lighting, editing, product photography, merchandise design, and digital illustration. Whenever possible, we created our own single artwork and merchandise concepts, and I even began making handmade resin pendants featuring Berried Alive artwork and lyrics, carefully encapsulated beneath glass-like domes one at a time.
Only now do I realize we were never simply building a band, we were building a creative world.
At the same time, another realization was quietly resurfacing. Fashion had been my first creative love long before music entered my life. As a child, I filled sketchbooks with clothing collections, imagined runway shows, and spent countless hours drawing garments instead of simply wearing them. Somewhere along the way, that dream became overshadowed by other pursuits, but designing merchandise for Berried Alive awakened it again. Every new drop made me want to push further than another graphic T-shirt or hoodie. I wanted to create garments that felt original, thoughtfully constructed, and unmistakably ours.
Around that time, I also became completely absorbed in fashion audiobooks. I have listened to every fashion-related audiobook I can find, but two in particular arrived at exactly the right moment. Bobby Hundreds' This Is Not a T-Shirt chronicled the growth of The Hundreds through an unapologetically independent spirit, while Marc Ecko's Unlabel told the story of building a global brand from hand-painted airbrushed T-shirts and relentless determination. Their stories felt remarkably familiar because they reflected exactly what Charlie and I were already experiencing.
But there is one streetwear origin story I relate to more than any other. Today I am listening to Bigger Than Fashion, Tyler Watamanuk's comprehensive history of streetwear, and one of its earliest chapters focuses on Shawn Stüssy. Before Stüssy became one of the defining names in streetwear, he was simply an artisan shaping custom surfboards by hand. He discovered almost accidentally that the T-shirts he printed for surf shows often sold more successfully than the surfboards themselves, and gradually his creative path shifted in a completely unexpected direction.
Hearing this sounded so familiar, because Charlie and I used to joke that we were really just glorified T-shirt salespeople. Like so many independent musicians, we quickly learned that records rarely paid the bills. Merchandise became what allowed us to continue creating music in the first place. I understand why Stüssy's story resonates so deeply with me. His transition into fashion was not abandoning one creative discipline for another. It was allowing one artistic practice to grow naturally into the next.
Without realizing it yet, that was exactly what was beginning to happen to me.
The Collection That Became My Fashion Education
Once I realized I wanted Berried Alive to become something more than band merchandise, I started sketching my first premium cut-and-sew apparel collection.
For years I had filled sketchbooks with fashion illustrations, and to my surprise it all came back almost effortlessly. Drawing silhouettes, thinking about proportions, experimenting with construction details, it felt familiar, almost like returning to a language I had not spoken in years. At the same time, I had spent years brainstorming artwork concepts and creating my own repeating patterns for Berried Alive, so I suddenly found myself with an enormous library of ideas to draw from. Fruit illustrations became engineered prints. Album artwork evolved into textile concepts. Graphic motifs transformed into all-over patterns. For the first time, I could see a path toward creating garments that felt entirely our own.
The collection eventually grew into four pieces: the Hellapeño Camouflage Jacket, the Legendberry Velvet Tracksuit, the Let's Get Bananas Windbreaker, and a buffalo plaid shacket. Although each garment explored a different direction within streetwear, they were all united by the same philosophy. I wanted every piece to feel original, collectible, and thoughtfully designed, borrowing the level of detail I admired in luxury fashion while remaining true to the colorful personality of Berried Alive.
The Hellapeño Jacket explored custom camouflage built entirely from Strawberry Crossbones logos, paired with metallic lining and premium construction details that elevated what might otherwise have been a familiar silhouette. The Legendberry Tracksuit experimented with rich velvet, custom monogram-inspired artwork, and coordinated separates that could be worn together or independently. The Let's Get Bananas Windbreaker introduced a fully custom banana print alongside technical details inspired by performance outerwear, while the buffalo plaid shacket became a more understated counterpart within the collection, balancing the louder pieces while still feeling unmistakably part of the same visual world.
I was already thinking about collections the same way I think about them today. I did not want isolated garments. I wanted pieces that spoke to one another, creating an entire world rather than a series of unrelated products.
Developing that collection with Portland Garment Factory became my first real education in apparel design. Until then, clothing had existed mostly inside sketchbooks. Suddenly I was sitting across the table from experienced patternmakers and sample makers discussing fabric weights, trim sourcing, zipper gauges, print strike-offs, graded specifications, seam construction, and production methods. Every meeting introduced another part of an industry I had admired from afar but had never truly understood.
I became fascinated by every step of the process.
I watched patterns being drafted in Optitex, learned how technical flats evolved into production-ready garments, studied graded spec sheets, reviewed print strike-offs, compared fabric swatches, and absorbed as much information as I possibly could. Years later, when I began teaching myself CLO3D, I was delighted to discover that I could open those original DXF pattern files and see the same patterns inside an entirely new program, almost like reconnecting with an old friend.
It became both a playground and the college degree in fashion I never got.
Then, almost overnight, everything changed. The pandemic arrived, material availability became unpredictable, costs increased dramatically, and uncertainty spread through nearly every part of the apparel industry. Charlie and I also found ourselves asking a more personal question. Berried Alive listeners had never simply been customers to us. Over the years many had become genuine friends, and during such an uncertain moment it felt difficult to ask them to invest in premium streetwear while so many people were simply trying to navigate everyday life.
Ultimately, we moved forward with mass producing only one garment from the collection, the Hellapeño Camouflage Jacket. Even now, I still hope to finish the rest someday.
Streetwear has never stopped feeling like home to me.
The Hoodie I Couldn't Leave Behind
When I eventually began designing Still Life, I knew I wanted House of Caswell to explore an entirely different part of fashion.
The collection revolved around original pastel artwork, coordinated prints, satin, silk, tailoring, and womenswear. It was a very different visual language from anything I had created for Berried Alive, yet I never saw it as leaving one creative identity behind in order to adopt another. Instead, it felt like carrying everything I had learned into a new chapter.
That is why I knew almost immediately that Still Life needed a hoodie. I wanted one piece that acknowledged where I had come from. The Gabriela Hoodie became a bridge between two creative worlds, combining the elevated materials and painterly aesthetic of House of Caswell with the streetwear background that first taught me how garments are developed.
Ironically, the piece that would become one of the most meaningful garments in the collection almost looked completely different.
The Hoodie That Kept Evolving
Like almost every garment I design, the Gabriela Hoodie did not emerge fully formed. Its first version looked very different from the one that ultimately became part of Still Life.
Because my background had been rooted in streetwear, I naturally began with a silhouette that felt familiar. I designed the hoodie in CLO3D using white French terry with raglan sleeves for ease of movement, contrasting merlot rib trim, and an oversized chenille House of Caswell logo across the front. The original Still Life artwork appeared across the back, allowing the garment to function much like the premium graphic hoodies I had admired for years.
At the time, with my streetwear background, it felt like the obvious solution.
Then I showed the collection to Katherine, who was helping me with House of Caswell's marketing. Fresh eyes are one of the greatest gifts a designer can receive.
She loved the collection overall, but she paused when we reached the hoodie. From a marketing perspective, she explained that asking people to wear a large House of Caswell logo across the front of the garment might be a difficult introduction to a brand that had not launched yet. Established fashion houses can often rely on logos because years of recognition already exist behind them, but a new brand has to earn that familiarity over time.
Instead, she suggested something wonderfully simple: move the artwork to the front. The original pastel painting was already the emotional center of the collection. It immediately communicated something about the brand that a logo could not. It invited curiosity before recognition. The more I thought about it, the more I agreed.
At the same time, I decided to make another change. Rather than keeping the body white, I redesigned the hoodie in CLO3D to a deep merlot red to better reflect the color palette of the collection. The warmer color made the garment feel richer, more cohesive, and much more connected to the rest of Still Life.
For a while, I thought those would be the final revisions, but then development began. As I started selecting fabrics with my development partner, another challenge appeared. I had originally selected a French terry fabric for the hoodie, but finding the right shade of merlot proved much more difficult than I expected. The fabric could certainly be custom dyed, but by that point the newly implemented tariffs had already increased material costs significantly. Purchasing the fabric and then dyeing it would have pushed the hoodie far beyond the retail price I felt comfortable asking customers to pay.
At the same time, I realized something else. The hoodie was the only garment in the collection made from French terry. Almost every other piece shared materials with at least one other garment, allowing cutting costs and production efficiencies to be spread across multiple styles. The hoodie stood alone. It required its own fabric, its own cutting process, and its own additional expense. Even if the French terry had been perfect, it was becoming increasingly difficult to justify.
Rather than asking how I could preserve the original design, I found myself asking a different question: What was the collection already trying to tell me?
The answer had been sitting on my desk the entire time.
Surrounding me were the satin swatches I had already selected for several of the other garments in Still Life. One particular stretch satin, a rich merlot that would become the lining and trims for multiple pieces throughout the collection, immediately caught my attention. I began wondering what would happen if the hoodie itself were made from that same fabric instead.
Before making the decision, I recreated the garment in CLO3D one more time, and the transformation surprised me. Instead of feeling like a compromise, the satin completely elevated the design. The hoodie suddenly felt luxurious, unexpected, and unlike anything most people already owned, like that original Legendberry tracksuit. It became more visually connected to the rest of the collection, shared materials with several other garments, reduced production costs across multiple styles, and ultimately solved several problems at once without sacrificing the original spirit of the piece.
When I shared the revised concept with my development partner, she immediately agreed. The satin version was the right direction.
Looking Back
Preparing my design presentations unexpectedly reminded me that I no longer think about my creative career as separate chapters.
At first glance, House of Caswell and Berried Alive might appear to belong to two completely different creative worlds, but that has never felt like an accurate way of describing what happened. House of Caswell did not emerge after I left streetwear behind, it grew directly from everything streetwear taught me.
The Gabriela Hoodie represents that more clearly than any other piece in Still Life. It carries the influence of the first premium collection I ever designed, the lessons I learned sitting inside Portland Garment Factory, the countless hours spent experimenting with repeating patterns for Berried Alive, and the understanding that the best design solutions rarely arrive all at once. They evolve through collaboration, technical problem-solving, changing circumstances, and a willingness to keep asking better questions.
I am actually grateful the original hoodie never made it into production. Had it remained exactly as I first sketched it, it would have been a perfectly nice French terry hoodie.
Instead, it became something far more distinctive.
The gleaming satin transformed it into exactly what I had hoped it would become. It still carries the relaxed familiarity of streetwear, but the material elevates it into something unexpected, catching the light in a way that echoes the silk and satin used throughout the rest of the collection. It feels equally at home alongside the Mia Ensemble, the satin details of the Carly Ensemble, and the painterly world of Still Life, while still honoring the creative world that first inspired me to become an apparel designer. I cannot imagine the collection without it.
I often write about Artful Nostalgia as the idea that clothing can preserve memories. The Gabriela Hoodie preserves something slightly different. It preserves a chapter of my own creative education.
An Invitation
Every House of Caswell garment begins long before the first sample is sewn. It begins with artwork, research, conversations, revisions, unexpected challenges, and countless small decisions that gradually shape the final piece into what it eventually becomes.
The Gabriela Satin Hoodie may look like a single garment, but for me it also carries years of learning, from sketchbooks filled with childhood fashion drawings, to designing premium streetwear for Berried Alive, to discovering the technical side of apparel development, and finally to bringing those experiences together in Still Life.
If these stories resonate with you, not simply as fashion but as a way of understanding creativity, craftsmanship, and the evolving process behind wearable art, I invite you to explore the Gabriela Satin Hoodie and the rest of the Still Life collection.
And if you would like to follow along as future collections continue developing, I also invite you to join the Collector's List, where I share new Journal entries, behind-the-scenes process work, collection updates, artwork, and the evolving philosophy behind House of Caswell as an exploration of memory, authorship, and wearable art.