Aisling Camps took an unusual route to founding her fashion label. Though she already has a 2023 Fashion Trust U.S. Award and 2024 CFDA Frazier Family Foundation Empowered Vision Award under her belt, the Trinidad-born designer began her career in a very different field. In 2008, she graduated from Columbia University with a degree in mechanical engineering with a focus on sustainability. After entering the workforce in the midst of an economic crash, she found employment as an engineer. Though she jokingly calls it her “quarter-life crisis,” she always possessed an artistic itch. This led her to take a risk and enroll in night classes at FIT. Following her courses, she experienced visa issues and returned to Trinidad. And so, Aisling Camps the label was born.
In Trinidad, Camps’s pursuit as a knitwear designer involved a new set of challenges. At home, people were not used to conceptualizing classic knitwear in the heat. There was also a lack of access to traditional materials for her chosen craft. “I was not buying any wool or cashmere. I was buying linen and a really tightly spun cotton with texture, really dry yarns, because it’s 95 degrees there every day,” she explains. However, from these untraditional roadblocks came innovation. This mindset is still present in her designs today. Her fall 2026 ready-to-wear collection aptly balanced exaggerated chunky knits with lighter, layerable pieces like an elongated tank that can be looped around the body in a multitude of ways.
A creative mindset and technical know-how certainly helped Camps approach these challenges, and her skills from engineering transferred to subversive knitwear much easier than one might think. “I nerded out on just becoming really good at this craft,” she says. The act of programming a loom felt familiar from her engineering days. The robots might have been slightly different, but much of the language remained the same. In fact, the language was so universal that her intimate understanding of the mechanics proved to be invaluable in moving part of her production to Italy.
Twenty percent of all the products Camps produces today are still handmade by her. It’s a hefty task for a fledgling brand that can count Bergdorf Goodman, Nordstrom, and an array of other shops as retailers. It’s part of the reason why Camps has endeavored to scale the business with overseas production. She spent a year in Italy going back and forth, attending Pitti Filati, studying Italian, and understanding the production language necessary to communicate with the factories’ lead programmers. Since then, the brand has matured rapidly.
Now Camps can also toast her New York Fashion Week debut. The presentation, which was held in an intimate salon-style setting, officially introduced her knitwear vision to the city. In a landscape of intense minimalism, it was refreshing to see even the most wearable pieces possess a bit of pizzazz. A chunky but shrunken macramé capelet was as editorial as it was functional. The same goes for a knit hoodie that was styled under a string bikini–like top—it confused the seasonal context of knitwear as Camps has always hoped to do. “When people think of knitwear, they think of really classic shapes, really classic stitches, and I wanted to turn that on its head,” she says. “I wanted to have that tension.”
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