Over the summer, Lafayette 148’s Emily Smith invited her design team to her new house in upstate New York to do research for their pre-fall collection.

“I got a house upstate as a great way to create work life balance. Honestly, I thought that decorating a house would be what my other creative outlet was, but it turned out that the garden was really driving a new passion for me,” Smith said.

She continued that her practice of gardening isn’t about perfection, but rather finding the joy in experimentation, which inspired Smith and her team to pull creative ideas out of the hobby and translate them into tactile garments. For instance, flowerbeds were translated into gridded prints on leisure suiting; the texture of tactile Chantilly cross-stitch knits were inspired by tall foxglove and l

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