The Question That Returns
Over the years, people have asked Charlie and me some version of the same question. Why Berried Alive? Why fruit? Why build an entire visual language around something that, at first glance, feels playful, even unserious?
Now, with the release of my first collection for House of Caswell, Still Life, the question has returned again, this time in a different form. Because while the brand itself will not remain fruit-centered, this first collection is undeniably shaped by it. It exists as a bridge, not only between mediums, but between phases of my life, and fruit sits at the center of that transition.
So the question becomes less about aesthetic choice and more about continuity. Not why fruit in isolation, but why it has remained, and why it continues to reappear even as everything else evolves.
A Memory That Became a Language
The answer is not conceptual. It does not begin with branding, or even with intention. It begins with a memory, one that felt fleeting at the time but has since taken on a kind of permanence.
There is a line from Friends that I’ve always remembered, about “the night,” the moment when two people realize their feelings for each other and stay up talking for hours, learning everything they can about one another. For Charlie and me, that night happened early in our relationship, during a weekend that felt unusually open. We had known each other since childhood, growing up in a small town and in the same classes, always familiar but never close. It wasn’t until much later that we became something more, and even then, time together felt limited by work, college, and circumstance.
That weekend, for reasons I can’t fully recall, neither of us was working.
We spent the day in a way that would have seemed ordinary to anyone else. We woke up early to help a friend move, then wandered through stores without buying much, the kind of aimless shopping that is less about acquiring anything and more about moving through space together. On the drive, we talked about music, about bands we liked at the time, and at one point we started joking about how often the word “bury” appeared in metal band names, like After the Burial or Between the Buried and Me. It was a passing conversation, something that didn’t feel particularly important, and it slipped away as quickly as it came.
Later, we ended up at Walmart, and for reasons that still feel strange to explain, we stopped in the aisle with adult diapers and started talking about how long it had been since we had worn diapers ourselves, what they might feel like now, how absurd the idea was. As a joke, we bought a pack, took them back to my mom’s house, and put them on, laughing at the ridiculousness of it, the kind of shared, private humor that only exists in specific moments with specific people. We even wore them under our clothes to Charlie’s practice space later that night, quietly carrying that secret with us while we helped his bandmates clean up, trying not to laugh in front of everyone else.
By the time we got back to my room that night, everything felt heightened, slightly surreal in the way that certain days do. We smoked pot out of a bong Charlie had borrowed from a friend and continued laughing about the diapers we were still wearing under our clothes.
We were sitting there eating Gushers, one of my favorite snacks at the time, listening to a new album, talking about everything and nothing in the way that only happens when time stops feeling structured. At some point, Charlie turned to me and said, “I want to change the name of my band. What do you think I should change it to?”
For years, even before we were dating, he had been in a band called The Fall Into Black. I had their t-shirts and wore them constantly. The idea that he wanted to change the name felt unexpected, but it made sense. The band had gone through changes, and he wanted something that felt like a new beginning.
I remember holding the pack of Gushers in my hand, the sweetness of it still lingering, leaning my head back against the white gauzy curtain in my room. I thought about the conversation we had earlier that day, about the word “bury,” about how often it appeared, and without overthinking it, I said, “Berried Alive. Only, it’s berried like a strawberry. And everything you ever do is fruit themed.”
At first, it felt like a joke.
But the more we talked about it, the more it expanded. What started as something absurd became something strangely clear. We began imagining everything that could exist around it, the visuals, the colors, the names, the contrast between the seriousness of the music and the playfulness of the concept. We were laughing, but we were also building something, even if we didn’t fully realize it yet.
By the time the sun came up, we had filled an entire page, front and back, with ideas.
Building Something That Didn’t Exist Yet
What followed was not immediate clarity or success, but something slower and more layered.
The original version of the band came together and eventually fell apart, as many early projects do. But the idea itself did not disappear. Charlie continued under the name, first on his own and with occasional collaborations with friends, and over time, what we had imagined that night began to take shape in a more tangible way.
We built everything around it.
Music, visuals, merchandise, videos, characters, an entire world that extended far beyond the original idea. We traveled across states to film, turned garages into sets, taught ourselves how to use cameras and lighting, and slowly developed a visual language that felt cohesive, even as we were figuring it out in real time. We kept a shared note filled with fruit puns, adding to it on long walks, letting it grow without deciding exactly what it needed to become. We still add to that list to this day.
At the same time, we began experimenting with smaller ideas as well, designing and producing objects that existed alongside the music. The first of these was a functional piece for guitars, something Charlie had been thinking about, which we developed together into a product and eventually sold under the name Muffle Cuffs, another idea we actually discussed on “the night” back in 2010. It was our first experience building something tangible as a pair, something that existed outside of the music but still carried the same energy of creation.
What we were building was not just a band.
It was a shared world, one that unfolded over time, shaped by both of us in ways that were not always visible from the outside.
The Complexity of Collaboration
Working with your partner introduces a different kind of dynamic, one that is both deeply fulfilling and, at times, complicated.
There are moments where creative disagreements feel personal, where authorship becomes difficult to define, where something you have poured yourself into is not always recognized as yours in a formal sense. Berried Alive is still, in many ways, seen as Charlie’s project, and in many respects, that is true.
But for me, it has always been something shared.
It holds years of memory, effort, and identity, something that exists between us rather than belonging entirely to one of us. That space, while not always easy to navigate, has shaped the way I think about collaboration, not as a division of roles, but as a kind of overlap, where ideas move back and forth, where ownership is less important than what is created together.
A Bridge Into Something New
When I began House of Caswell, I was not starting from nothing, even though the work itself took on a different form.
The Still Life collection began as a single pastel painting, which was then translated into textile and eventually into garments. The visual language is quieter, more grounded in art history and composition, but underneath that, there is a continuity that connects it back to everything that came before.
Fruit remains, not as spectacle, but as reference.
There are no longer exaggerated characters or overt narratives, but the motif is still present, because it is part of the language I have been building, both consciously and unconsciously, for over fifteen years. It is not the entire story, but it is the beginning of it, and because of that, it felt necessary to return to it here.
Not as repetition, but as acknowledgment.
Why Fruit
So when I return to the question now, the answer feels less like an explanation and more like a recognition.
Fruit is not something I chose because it made sense. It is something that stayed, something that carried forward from a specific night, a specific moment, into everything that followed.
It holds memory, relationship, collaboration, and the beginning of a creative life that has continued to evolve across music, image, and now clothing. It exists as a thread that connects these different forms, not always visibly, but consistently.
And because of that, it became the starting point again.
An Invitation
If this way of thinking resonates with you, not as a fixed aesthetic but as a way of understanding how memory, relationship, and creative work can evolve together over time, I invite you to join the Collector’s List.
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