When an Idea Is Still Only a Drawing
Sometimes the most important things begin unexpectedly.
Before House of Caswell existed as a brand, it existed as drawings. For a few months, those drawings lived exclusively on my computer. I was sketching collections in 2D CAD as a kind of creative exercise, imagining what a high-end womenswear line connected to Berried Alive might look like.
But the sketches were not a plan yet. They were something I did in the same spirit as a notebook doodle or a late-night idea. A way of making something simply because I felt the urge to create. At the time, I had begun to feel slightly restless.
Charlie and I had spent years building Berried Alive together. We wrote songs, created artwork, released albums, designed collections for every release. It was joyful work and deeply collaborative, but after years of repeating the same cycle I began to feel something I could only describe as stillness. Beautiful, creative stillness, but stillness nonetheless.
That feeling is what led me to write a song called Still Life. It was about the moment when life feels arranged, almost like a painting, but not quite moving forward. I think I was searching for motion again, and the sketches were part of that search.
The Job I Didn’t Get
Around that same time, I applied for a job I thought I really wanted.
What excited me most about the position was not the job itself, but the opportunity to learn a program I had been curious about for years: CLO3D. I had first discovered digital garment simulation back in 2019 while working with Portland Garment Factory, and ever since then I had wanted to learn it. I joined the Optitex (another 3D garment simulator program) mailing list and opened and read all of their emails religiously for years. I even watched a CLO3D course on Udemy, even though I didn’t yet have the program and couldn’t even follow along.
When I did not get the job, I was disappointed, but the disappointment quickly turned into something else. If the job was not going to teach me the program, I would teach myself.
For the next couple months I treated it like a personal boot camp. I watched tutorial after tutorial, followed online courses, studied patternmaking books, and practiced constantly until the interface began to feel natural.
Eventually there came a moment when I stopped following lessons and started experimenting on my own. And the very first garment I attempted to build was the skirt from the Carly Ensemble.
A Name From a Childhood Sketchbook
Every piece in the Still Life collection carries a name from one of my childhood fashion sketches.
When I was young, I filled sketchbook after sketchbook with designs. But I did not just draw clothing. I named every garment. I kept long lists of names. Baby name lists, international name lists, random name generators. I was always searching for new names because the sketches kept multiplying.
Over the years, most of those sketchbooks disappeared through moves and time. But one survived, and it is the one I still have today. When I began naming the pieces in the Still Life collection, I returned to that book. Each garment borrowed its name from a design drawn by a younger version of me.
Carly was one of those names.
Sometimes I flip through that sketchbook and see the handwriting of a younger version of myself labeling each design, completely certain that these clothes belonged in the world. Naming the collection this way felt like reaching back across time and quietly telling her that one of those ideas had finally made it here.
When I selected the names for the collection, I also made sure none of them began with the same letter. It felt like a small way of honoring the girl who once treated every sketch as its own character.
The First Garment I Ever Built
When I opened CLO3D and began constructing the Carly skirt digitally, I started with the foundation from Patternmaking for Fashion Design by Helen Joseph-Armstrong, a book that has guided so much of my learning.
I did not copy the pattern directly. Instead I used the fundamentals as a starting point and built the design outward from there.
The silhouette was inspired by the classic skirt suit. There were echoes of Chanel tailoring, of Jackie Kennedy’s elegance, and of the playful structure of 1960s mod fashion. The 1960s are one of my biggest inspiration for both fashion and music, so that nod had to be in the collection somewhere. In fact, my 2025 Spotify “listening age” was deemed to be 84, so that just shows you how frequently I return to that era for inspiration!
But I could not help bringing a piece of my own childhood into it as well. The cargo pockets were an homage to the late 90s and early 2000s, when cargo pockets seemed to exist on everything. They were practical, slightly rebellious details that contrasted with the refinement of the silhouette.
When the finished skirt appeared rendered in three dimensions on my screen, something changed inside me.
For the first time, the collection I had been drawing “just for fun” felt possible. No longer hypothetical, but a real possibility.
Learning to Trust the Process
Some of the elements I now love most about the Carly Ensemble almost did not happen. When the first strike-offs for the fabric arrived, I remember opening the package and feeling a flash of disappointment. I had designed the print expecting the highly saturated colors I was used to seeing in Berried Alive clothing.
But the cotton-wool herringbone twill behaved differently than the polyester-heavy fabrics I was used to. Because the natural fibers absorb dye unevenly, the fabric emerged with a softly faded character, almost like something vintage that had already lived a life before reaching me.
At first I thought something had gone wrong, but my development consultant encouraged me to reconsider. She suggested that for a design inspired by vintage tailoring, this effect might actually be perfect.
So I recreated the garment in CLO3D using a faded version of the fabric so I could see what it would look like on the actual garment and realized that she was right.
From a distance, the merlot and blue tones blend together into something that reads almost lavender, which is House of Caswell’s signature color. What began as a moment of doubt became one of those rare design outcomes that feels like serendipity.
There was another lesson in collaboration as well that came out of the fit sample process. My original jacket design had three buttons on the sleeve. When the first sample arrived, one sleeve had three buttons and the other had four. I assumed it was a mistake, and it made me doubt everything.
But it was intentional. My consultant wanted me to see the difference between 3 and 4 buttons in real life without having to make 2 separate jackets. And once I did, I realized she was right again. Four buttons felt more balanced, more finished.
It was one of the first moments where I understood that trusting the process could make a design stronger.
Vintage Spirit, Modern Life
The Carly Ensemble is my interpretation of the classic skirt suit. It nods to Chanel, to Jackie Kennedy. To the crisp confidence of 1960s mod silhouettes.
But it also carries the influence of the era I grew up in, through cargo pockets that echo the practicality of 90s style, with oversized buttons that add a small note of whimsy. Because if you know me, you know I tend to be a little whimsical whenever possible.
In many ways, the Carly Ensemble became my own interpretation of a cargo pocket skirt suit, something that carries the elegance of vintage tailoring while adapting to the realities of modern life through a detail I insisted on testing myself: I made sure my phone fit inside the cargo pocket and could still close completely.
Because vintage inspiration should still meet modern life.
Where House of Caswell Began
The Carly Mini Skirt was the first garment I ever built built in CLO3D, but more importantly, it was the moment when an idea became a commitment.
What had begun as sketches drawn during a restless season of life suddenly felt like something I could actually build. Within weeks, I had recreated the entire fourteen-piece collection in CLO3D, and from there, everything else followed. Factory conversations, fabric selection, and the long series of decisions that eventually turned those sketches into the first House of Caswell collection.
The Carly skirt was simply the first step. But sometimes the first step is the one that quietly redraws the direction of your life.
An Invitation
If you would like to explore the piece that began this chapter, you can view the Carly Ensemble, the Carly Mini Skirt, and the Carly Cardigan Jacket here.
And if you would like to receive future Journal entries before they are shared anywhere else, I invite you to join the Collector’s List.
The Journal always arrives there first, as part of an ongoing conversation about art, memory, and becoming.