Color as Emotional Architecture
Color has always been its own language for me. It is a way to communicate emotion without speaking, a way to move someone before they even know why they’re moved. It isn’t decorative. It’s architectural. It builds atmosphere.
When I began creating Still Life, I knew the collection needed to return to one core thing: the emotional atmosphere of my original pastel painting. That artwork wasn’t just the visual origin of the collection, it was the emotional origin. The colors held the story long before patterns or silhouettes existed.
To understand that language more clearly, I broke the painting apart digitally and experimented with how it translated through different reductions. Each version revealed something different, where the weight lived, where tension emerged, where clarity softened.
When I reduced the painting to eight colors and pushed their saturation slightly higher, everything came into focus. It didn’t feel like loss, it felt like distillation. The emotional core of the artwork, clarified.
Those eight colors became the backbone of Still Life: deep blues that ground the world, reds that carry warmth and humanity, a balancing green, and a single cool yellow, Pantone Lime Punch, appearing sparingly like a flash of clarity inside introspection.
Color was not an afterthought.
Color was the beginning.
Color as Identity, Not Ornament
Long before House of Caswell, color had already shaped how I understood myself.
Charlie and I have spent years creating clothing for Berried Alive using, quite literally, every crayon in the box, and that has always been intentional. Many fans come to the band through a traditional metal or goth background, where black dominates and seriousness is often equated with restraint. But that was never us.
We aren’t goth. We aren’t even really metalheads in the cultural sense. We play technical, guitar-oriented music that often gets categorized as metal because it doesn’t fit neatly anywhere else. But the music itself is extremely colorful, moving across genres, moods, and emotional registers constantly.
A monochrome visual world never felt honest.
So the clothes have to reflect that. The bright, often neon colors aren’t meant to shock, they’re meant to align. And for many fans arriving from darker palettes, those colors have become a refreshing change of pace. A reminder that intensity doesn’t require the absence of color.
Much of my own personal wardrobe comes from Berried Alive samples, which means I live surrounded by color. And it makes me happy. Color makes the complexion vibrate. It animates the body. It changes how it feels to move through the world, and how it feels to see other people moving through it.
Minimalism has never computed for me.
A Lifelong Practice of Naming Color
I’ve been obsessed with color for as long as I can remember.
Every time I got a new box of crayons, colored pencils, or markers (which was often because I went through them constantly) the first thing I’d do wasn’t draw. I’d take out a wide-ruled notebook and write down the name of every single color using that exact crayon, pencil, or marker.
I had notebooks and notebooks full of color lists.
One of my favorite rituals was cataloging color itself. My favorite magazine was Lucky, the shopping magazine that no longer exists but shaped so much of how I learned to see fashion. Every month, I’d read the issue cover to cover. Then I’d go back through it page by page and write down every color name mentioned anywhere in the magazine.
Because Lucky was about shopping, everything was labeled. Garment colorways, makeup shades, even advertisements listed all available options. I would painstakingly record them all. I started doing this as a fashion-obsessed little girl and kept doing it through college.
I still remember the first time my dorm roommate walked in on me mid color-listing. She just stood there watching me transcribe color names like it was sacred work.
In a way, it was.
One of my favorite games to play with my mom involved catalogs, especially makeup catalogs or J.Crew catalogs, which always had quirky color names. When we were in the car, I’d list all the available colors out loud, and we’d decide which one sounded the prettiest. My mom loved color too. That shared language stayed with me.
These notebooks weren’t research.
They were autobiography.
The Mia Ensemble as a Lived Expression
I’ve worked mainly from home for almost ten years now. Over time, clothing stopped feeling like something I put on before life began and took off when it ended. What I wear at home has become what I live in. These are the clothes I spend the most time seeing, touching, and moving inside of.
That reality shaped the Mia Ensemble.
Mia emerged as a response to how I actually live. Clothing designed to move seamlessly between rest, work, and the outside world. Original artwork translated into silk. Color meant to be lived with, not preserved.
I wanted something that felt as intentional at home as it does outside. Something soft enough to sleep in, polished enough to work in, and expressive enough to wear out, without costume or performance.
Color here isn’t precious.
It isn’t protected.
It’s worn, folded, washed, lived in.
Reframing Luxury
There’s something meaningful to me about Still Life being built around primary colors, the foundation of all others and the first lesson in color theory. This collection is the starting point of House of Caswell. A debut. A first chapter. A primary moment in every sense.
Luxury, to me, isn’t about spectacle or visibility. It’s about proximity. About the clothes closest to our bodies and routines receiving the same care as the ones we’re seen in.
The clothes we live in deserve color.
They deserve intention.
They deserve beauty.
Closing Invitation
If you’d like to follow the work more closely, the Collector’s List is always open. It’s a quiet place where I share early access, behind-the-scenes process, and the stories that shape each piece before it ever reaches the world.
You can explore the Mia Ensemble in full, or view the Mia Silk Shirt and Mia Silk Pants individually. Each was designed to carry color into the rhythms of everyday life.
Color has always been my way of understanding the world.
I’m grateful to share it with you.
→ Join the Collector’s List
→ Explore the Mia Ensemble
→ Mia Silk Shirt
→ Mia Silk Pants