Shadygrove by Daisy Morrison

My collection, “Back Home Again,” is centred around the themes of home, place, family history, and the ways that these ideas intertwine. This collection is inspired by my late grandfather’s thesis project in architecture school – a house he designed and built for his parents-in-law on the shores of British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake, and where my mother grew up spending her summers. My grandfather worked within the West Coast Modern school of architecture, which centres the importance of landscape and geography within the built environment, and utilizes natural and local materials. Throughout my time in fashion school, I have found myself time and again looking to architecture and interiors for inspiration in my work. I’m obsessed with the significance of the built environment around us – the clothes on our bodies, the spaces we reside in, the objects we choose to carry with us or to discard. In my work, I find myself looking at fashion with the mindset of creating a home for the body to inhabit. I strove to translate details originally rendered by my grandfather into the garments of this collection. Looking to the way he utilized light and shadows to create simple, unique, and beautiful details in his work, these garments are explorations in shape, line, and dimension, employing the West Coast Modern embrace of natural materials, and drawing inspiration from the landscape and colour palette of the Okanagan. My grandfather is no longer with us, nor does the house remain in our family, yet in looking to his work as inspiration for my own, I can connect with a piece of our shared history that is otherwise out of reach.