Caspar: The Label for the Modern-Day Sylvia Plath

Caspar Jones didn’t plan this in advance, but she’s now running one of the most exciting up-and-coming London-based fashion brands—designing pieces for poets, it-girls, and conscious consumers alike.

 

Jones started her brand on Depop, believe it or not. “I make stuff myself all the time, and I made a pair of trousers that didn’t fit me, so I listed them. And that’s where it all began. The trousers went viral, and I was getting requests to make more,” she shares. It was at that point that Caspar the Label was born, but Jones never expected it to grow at such a rapid rate. “I didn’t realize how big it had gotten while I was doing it. All of these orders were coming in, and I was handling everything myself as if it were normal. And looking back now, I don’t know how I did it.”

Her route into fashion was anything but straightforward, shaped more by instinct and improvisation than formal training. “No one in my family does anything particularly creative or is interested in clothes at all, actually, so really, Barbie dolls were my first introduction to fashion. I used to cut up clothes and make their outfits different,” she shares. Coming from a working-class background in Birmingham, she never saw fashion as a secure and steady job. She attended the University for the Creative Arts and, subsequently, Istituto Marangoni in East London, but dropped out of both courses and instead taught herself how to pattern cut and make clothes.

“I’m not really a plan-in-advance kind of person. I don’t have a five-year plan, I like to take every day as it comes, and I’ve molded myself to each stage,” she says, which is not only reflective of the work she did between leaving university and starting Caspar the Label in 2022—freelancing and working for other people in the creative field—but her approach to designing a collection.

 

One of her bestselling styles, The Poet Shirt, almost didn’t make the cut. It was an intern who ultimately told her she had to release it. Inspired by an image of Sylvia Plath wearing a cap sleeve top in a book Jones was reading about her life, she created a similar shape. “I sketched it out, and I thought to myself, ‘How do I make a button-down shirt that you can wear every day unique?’ I added the second row of buttons, and then I wanted to do something without a collar. High necks weren’t quite there yet, but they were on the rise, so I added that, sampled it the next day, shot it the day after, and that’s it. It went crazy,” she says. Just a year prior, she went viral again, this time with The Venus Skirt, worn by it girls like Addison Rae. It’s as if Jones has the Midas touch, able to make a timeless (yet extremely modern-feeling) design that everyone and their mother wants to own.

 

Her process is similar for all of her designs, though with a slightly longer turnaround. From the outset, the most crucial aspect of the design is the technicalities—one being making sure her designs are actually wearable. Doing all the samples, changes, and final garments in-house is something that she’s continued to do, even as Caspar the Label has grown. The only difference? She now employs someone to make the tech pack to be sent to her manufacturer–a female-owned home atelier in Madagascar.

“I want to be something people go to and think, ‘Oh, this is special. There’s not been much made of this. I don’t have the same clothes as everyone else, and I’m not getting something made in a sweatshop with inappropriate ethics.’ I want people to have an option that’s fashionable, cool, innovative. That isn’t Loewe, but isn’t Zara. There has to be some kind of in-between for the girls that love fashion,” she details.

The quiet regression away from conscious consumption and toward convenience is something Jones is actively resisting. From how she runs Caspar the Label to how she shops herself, she’s choosing to do things differently, even if the system around her is sliding the other way.

---

Keep up with Caspar the Label on Instagram, and explore the latest collection on their website.