You Should Just Paint
I have been thinking of my life as a fashion designer as a kind of layering.
The thought surfaced as my pen moved across an empty page. The first layer. I was sketching what would become the fourth piece for the Odyssey Collection—silk scarves that feature my original paintings, a new body of work that merges art and fashion for my clothing brand. I had loved drawing as a child, but somewhere along the way, I set it aside. In that moment, I realized that before any colour reaches a canvas, the work already exists in fragments.
And what fragments shaped the past ten years of my clothing brand? Some decades are remembered for sweeping technological revolutions, and others put humans on the moon. Can an individual have their own markers? Somehow, my journey still looks like a composition sketch. I grew, and opened my own showroom. I contracted, and moved to a shared space. I recalibrated, and now work from a home studio.
Ten years in, Vestige is still a one-woman show.
It has taken me years to admit that I am not primarily driven by business instinct. At the beginning, I was thrilled to launch Vestige and design for my own brand. What I didn’t see then was how fully invested I would be with the creative side of work. Marketing, operations, and business development were necessary, but never central. Perhaps this explains why my journey still resembles a sketch more than a finished canvas.
Yet a decade of persistence has shown that slow growth can be just as meaningful. Unconvinced by influencer marketing, I focused instead on sharpening my own skills in writing, design, and photography.
By avoiding paid ads, Vestige has grown its audience organically. The brand reaches a modest but deeply engaged community—people I truly love designing for. With a decade of deliberate growth behind me, I found myself drawn back to my first love: drawing. At first, my goal was practical. I picked up the pencil again to illustrate for Vestige’s marketing materials. But as the brand turned ten, a more ambitious idea began to take shape: what if I could bring my art into my fashion?
I imagined paintings that captured fragments of memory, then translated onto garments. From that vision emerged a series of silk scarves. The Odyssey Collection became the underpainting of a new direction for Vestige.
The basecoat for this collection can be traced back to last year, when I painted my first Odyssey piece. Fabric printing wasn’t ready in time, so I brought a few fine art prints to a pop-up instead. By the end of the day, they had all found new homes. One customer lingered over my work and said, “You should just paint.”
Her words return to me on days when I hesitate to paint. Time seems to slow down whenever I hover over my desktop easel, my favourite playlist humming, a comforting cup of tea at hand.
There are still many days when I question my path, especially when I watch my work disappear silently into the algorithm. Yet, the anticipation of what my drawing might become is a thrill I know I will never outgrow.
As I look toward the next ten years, I feel the same spark that drew me back to my first sketches—fragments waiting to coalesce into something whole.