Why I Started Linen & Light

People often ask me how Linen & Light started, and the honest answer is: slowly, and from two very different places at once.

I grew up in the Seychelles, where the ocean, the light and the greenery around me were never something I had to seek out — they were just there, every day. When I moved to Europe, I missed that. Not in a dramatic way, just quietly, the way you miss weather you didn't know you'd grown used to.

Around the same time, I discovered linen. I'd studied textile design back home, so fabric had always mattered to me, but linen felt different — the way it moved, the way it aged, the way it never tried too hard. I loved it immediately. What I didn't love was how it was usually styled: beautiful, but almost always in the same narrow, neutral palette.

Two things I couldn't separate

I also dress modestly, as part of my faith, and I'd spent years piecing together outfits that were elegant and covered and still felt like me — which usually meant a lot of compromise. I wanted linen that didn't ask me to choose: modest but not plain, natural but not minimalist to the point of feeling cold.

So Linen & Light became my answer to both of those things at once. The prints are drawn from where I'm from — botanical, warm, a little bit tropical. The silhouettes are shaped by how I actually want to dress. And everything is made in small runs, because I'd rather get a piece right than get a hundred of them out quickly.

This journal is where I'll be sharing more of that — the fabric, the process, the thinking behind each collection. Thank you for being here for the start of it.