Where a Group Begins: Introducing The Rose Group

Every collection I build starts with a person I can't stop thinking about. This time, it was Elizabeth.

Not the queen on the coin — the girl before her. A mother executed before she was three years old. A father who alternated between calling her a bastard and reminding the world she was his blood. A childhood spent learning, quietly, how to survive a house that had already killed the person who loved her most.

That's the story underneath Tudor & Ash, and it's the story behind the first group I'm building inside it: The Rose Group — three coordinating prints for anyone tracking the archival-print moment happening in ready-to-wear right now, built the way I build everything, by hand first.

I wanted a group where something soft and alive could exist inside all that heaviness. So the flower became the hero of every print. Bold, blooming, undeniably alive — set against a palette that keeps circling back to white and red, the same two colors fused into the Tudor rose itself. Union and violence, stitched into one symbol. That tension is the whole group in miniature.

But the flower is only half the story. Underneath it — the ground of each print — is where the history lives:

One print grows out of brick, like the Tower itself, its florals trailing and climbing as if they're determined to escape. Another sits on a ceiling motif from Hampton Court, a quiet memento of two initials once carved into stone by two people who couldn't have known how their story would end. A third is framed in traditional Tudor strapwork — structured, formal, unmistakably of its era.

None of the prints are finished yet. Right now they're garden photos, wet gouache, and digital layouts still finding their shape. But that felt like the right way to start telling this story — not with the finished thing, but with how it's actually built.

More to come as The Rose Group grows.