I always felt like I belonged to the wrong time. When I was a kid, there were countless things I wanted to be when I grew up, and one of the major ones was a hippie. Before stores were selling bell bottom jeans again (and before they were re-named flare legs), I had my grandma sew a triangle of fabric into the side seam at the bottom of my straight-leg jeans to create a bell bottom. And she even surprised and delighted me by adding a star-shaped patch of matching fabric to the leg. I remember girls at school asking me where they could buy a similar pair because flare legs were just about to be in fashion, and how smug I felt telling them that they couldn’t buy a similar pair. Mine were one of a kind. About a year later, all the stores were selling flare leg jeans, but I’d had them first because I’d known already at 8 years old my favorite rule of fashion—what’s old will always be new again. That’s the inspiration for the Mod Balls print in the first House of Caswell collection.

There is something I can’t quite explain about seeing my art on real, high quality fabric for the first time. I felt this feeling before a few years ago when we produced a 5-piece cut-and-sew sample collection for Berried Alive (only one of the pieces was mass-produced and sold), and today I felt that experience again when I received the first two strike-offs for my first House of Caswell collection.