A Brief Chat with Daniela Caine, Founder of Koryphae
Prasenjit Tito Chowdhury
We love getting to know designers from all over the world, but it’s always a special treat to get in touch with the local talent that we have here in Portland.
Recently, we got a chance to chat with a local Portland designer who just launched her brand in April of this year and is already serving high quality, handmade garments designed with a sustainable ethos in mind.
Daniela Caine, the designer and founder of Koryphae, gave us some insight into her brand, her background and her mission to produce clothing that is not only sourced from the most high quality natural materials, but is also implementing practices that are humane to those making it.
With a background in the sportswear industry, and over 20 years of experience in sourcing, Daniela always felt that she could do her own thing, but wasn’t quite sure where to start. It wasn’t until she landed her first sourcing job for a small company in Germany, did she become inspired.
Three to four months into this new sourcing gig, she went on a sourcing trip to Bangladesh for a week. There, she was able to see the clothing factories and how they operated. While touring a clothing factory during that trip, she expected to see machines producing items like sweatshirts and tops, but was surprised to see that there were people in those factories, sewing every garment by hand, for hours on end.
Seeing how inhumane the working conditions were, she knew she had to make a difference. She went on to run a co-sourcing agency in Portland afterwards, and left the industry 5 years ago when her daughter became ill. During this period was a path of exploration and self growth.
Sustainability was always a focal point for Daniela, and she ended up launching a yoga brand, with products made of bamboo and soy. Unfortunately it didn’t work out.
After the end of her yoga brand, she began digging deeper into meditation, quantum physics and spirituality. During this time, she connected with a friend who told her about the concept of materials having frequencies. Curious and wanting to learn more, she researched the topic and found a study by Heidi Yellen, called the Scientific Details of the Linen Frequency.
In the study, Heidi ranked clothing materials such as cotton, linen and polyester and how much strain these materials have on the body. She discovered that fabrics like rayon or polyester rank at a 15, the same frequency as a nearly deceased person, while cotton and linen had a frequency of 5,000, which can give energy and movement to the human body. The study determined that more natural materials tend to have a higher abundance of natural living organisms, which are helpful in providing energy and healing to humans.
Inspired, Daniela decided to create a clothing line that focused solely on using natural materials with higher frequencies such as linen. As she would put it, using “fashion as a source for good” means using sustainable materials like linen while also employing artisans in India and paying them appropriate wages. All of her clothing is made on hand looms which don’t produce Co2, like standard machine looms.
And something she always keeps in mind is, how does the emotional state of the clothing impact the wearer? If the clothing is made by someone who’s underpaid and overworked, how does that energy latch on to the person wearing that clothing?
Daniela will be debuting her line at the FashioNXT 2022 show for the very first time this upcoming October. You don’t want to miss it!
You can find more information about Daniela and her brand Koryphae here: https://koryphae.com/
And you can read more about the study here: https://pdfcoffee.com/scientific-details-of-the-linen-frequency-study-pdf-free.html