project image · framed
commission · 2025
Antebellum festival gown
Texas Rose Festival · Tyler, TX
A second dialect for the same project, weighted toward heritage seamstress vocabulary — serif typography, muted neutrals, pattern-book card layouts, a single deep-wine accent. Less graphic-novel; more workshop-quiet.
Off-white cream as the primary surface, deep wine as the only saturated color, the rest in warm neutrals that age well in print.
A display serif for the headlines, a body serif for the running copy, and a script reserved for moments of warmth.
Sorts Mill Goudy is a digitization of Frederic Goudy's nineteenth-century book serif — warm, slightly irregular, with the kind of legibility that holds at small sizes and dignity that holds at large ones. We'd set the body at 17px / 1.65 line-height, with italic for emphasis rather than bold weight. The result reads like a pattern catalog from the 1960s set with care: confident but unhurried, with the breath of a workshop floor.
Each project as a pattern-book entry: small framed image, italic title, capital-letter label, a brief meta line. Pattern-card grid replaces hero-image-driven portfolio carousel.
A sample composition showing the register applied to a typical page section — subtitle, body paragraphs, pull-quote, transition language.
We build clothes for the people who need their garments to do something nobody off-the-rack would ask of them. A bride who's been thinking about the dress for three years. A theater company building costumes that will appear under stage lights and on archive video. A festival court whose gowns will be passed down to next year's wearer. A Wicked-night premiere where every costume needs to read at twenty feet.
Custom, in the way Cabbages and Roses meant custom.
It's the work of fitting a body, not a size. The work of finishing seams the way they were finished a hundred years ago, because that's what holds. The work of asking the right questions before the first cut — about who's wearing this, what they need it to do, where it's going to live, how it'll be cleaned. We talk to clients the way a good doctor takes a history.