I’ve always felt like I belonged to the wrong time.
As a child, there were countless things I imagined becoming, and one of the strongest was a hippie — someone rooted in expression, craft, and the freedom to dress outside of the present moment.
Long before stores reintroduced bell-bottoms — before they were rebranded as flare-leg jeans — I asked my grandmother to sew triangular inserts into the side seams of my straight-leg jeans. She didn’t just oblige. She surprised me, adding a star-shaped patch of matching fabric to the leg.
They were unmistakably mine.
The Origin
I remember girls at school asking where they could buy jeans like mine. Flare legs were just about to return to fashion, though they hadn’t yet arrived.
I felt quietly smug telling them they couldn’t buy them. Mine were one of a kind.
About a year later, every store was selling flares. But I’d had them first — not because I was trying to be ahead of trends, but because I already understood something essential at eight years old:
What’s old will always be new again.
That belief became foundational — not just to my personal style, but to how I understand fashion itself.
The Translation
On a literal level, the repeating forms in the Retro Stem pattern reference fruit and stems — abstracted, reduced, and intentionally ambiguous. They might suggest grapes, cherries, apples, or any rounded fruit growing along a vertical line.
In some iterations, the pattern appears in multiple colors, layered and playful. In others, it’s restrained — rendered in deep merlot or vibrant red against a saturated blue ground.
The fruit is present, but not declared. If you don’t immediately see it, that’s fine. The pattern isn’t asking to be decoded — only felt.
Why It Remains
The deeper inspiration is time itself.
I was drawn to mod-era fabric patterns from the 1960s while developing this print — bold geometry, repetition, confidence. But there are other echoes too. In the 1990s, Prada created extraordinary geometric prints in so-called “ugly-pretty” color combinations, and that tension has stayed with me.
This pattern holds all of that: the optimism of the ’60s, the intellectual sharpness of ’90s fashion, and the personal memory of knowing — early on — that fashion is a cycle, not a straight line.
I don’t want history to repeat itself.
But I love the way fashion does.
This is Artful Nostalgia in its most declarative form: past, present, and possibility layered into a single surface.
A Quiet Continuation
The Retro Stem pattern appears across the Carly Cardigan Jacket, Carly Mini Skirt, Carly Ensemble, and the Evie Cutout Dress, where graphic repetition becomes structure — bold, referential, and quietly confident.
It also surfaces more subtly throughout the collection, used in linings, trims, and pocket bags — small, intentional moments of continuity that reveal themselves over time rather than all at once.
For those who prefer to follow the work as it unfolds, the collector’s list offers early access, private notes from the studio, and first notice when new chapters arrive.
→ View the Carly Cardigan Jacket
→ View the Carly Mini Skirt
→ View the Carly Ensemble
→ View the Evie Cutout Dress
→ Join the Collector’s List
