You can literally grow your own dress with vintage-inspired brand Christy Dawn

As Christy Dawn Baskauskas was growing up, when most teenagers wanted new clothes, they would just go to the mall. But in his hometown of Placerville, in rural Northern California, that wasn’t an option. Instead, she would go vintage shopping with her mother and rework the pieces she found. “Growing up in a very small town, it was the natural thing to do,” says Dawn Baskauskas. “With the lack of shopping we made it work and it was really fun and it spoke to that part of me that loved being seen as unique and creating these unique pieces that I could wear and express myself- even. It started there, with my childhood.

A few years later, Dawn Baskauskas moved to Los Angeles to work as a model and she continued this tradition. She became known for her iconic style of floral dresses, which was unusual at the time. “I would show up on set with these dresses that I was recreating with my local tailor in Santa Monica and I would get compliments on them all the time,” she recalls. “People would stop me when we were going out, asking me ‘where did you find your dress?’ My design aesthetic and the way I liked to dress was noticed by people in the industry. As I continued to model and gained more and more clients, I was like a sponge, absorbing all the things I saw that were truly inspiring.

One day, Dawn Baskauskas came home from a photo shoot and told her then-boyfriend and now-husband, Aras Baskauskas, that she wanted to start her own business. That’s exactly what they did together, launching Christy Dawn with five styles in 2014. The co-founders admit that launching as an eco-conscious brand was a happy accident. Drawing on their own savings, funding was limited. “Christy wanted to make beautiful dresses, but we couldn’t go to a fabric supplier and order the minimum because we didn’t have the money,” says Baskauskas. “We also didn’t have the money to hire an artist to make a print. So we bought dead fabrics instead, i.e. leftover fabrics from other companies.

With Dawn Baskauskas’ experience as a model, they knew what constituted a good photo shoot. So they worked with a professional photographer friend to take beautiful photos and were early adopters of Instagram, which quickly helped them grow the brand. Looking back at their very first photoshoot in Big Sur, Christy Dawn’s aesthetic has evolved, but the DNA is clear in these images. “The magic is in Christy’s creations,” Baskauskas says. “People really responded to Christie’s creations and then we told the story of the dead animals. It felt really good to say that we’re not part of the problem. We sold out quickly.

They stayed true to their initial styles and made them in different deadstock fabrics, essentially creating limited editions every week. “But we eventually realized it wasn’t sustainable for ourselves,” says Dawn Baskauskas. “Additionally, as we evolved and began to better understand the industry, we looked more closely at the origin of dead tissue. That he has done? What is it printed with? Is it an organic coloring? Is it a synthetic dye? Is this fabric good for my body? From that point on, things started to change our perspective on how we wanted to grow our business.

One of the silhouettes that Christy Dawn launched with, The Dawn Dress, is still their best seller a decade later and has gained stardom, worn by Taylor Swift, Hilary Duff and Dakota Johnson, to name a few -ones. “It was the first dress I ever designed,” says Dawn Baskauskas. “The timelessness of this piece is so evident. It’s also a silhouette that really suits all body types. It has a small cap sleeve, a snap button closure for a larger or smaller bust and it has a drawstring waist, if you want to adjust it to be really fitted or a little loose. It’s the perfect length. Personally, I loved it when I was pregnant and postpartum. This is the kind of dress you wear every day and can dress up. You can travel there; it’s super comfortable and easy.

For the new Summer Christy Dawn collection, the Dawn dress is once again reinvented in a strawberry print. While some styles, like The Dawn Dress, are mainstays, they often reintroduce silhouettes from previous collections due to customer demand and data analysis that determines past successes. Christy Dawn presents for the first time a small collection for men this summer. For the new prints, as always, Dawn Baskauskas considered nature as her muse. “I grew up with 10 acres, we had horses and chickens and I was always outside,” she says. “Even today, I am so inspired by the beauty of nature, the seasons and flowers; there are so many incredible flowers, fruits and beauty that come with each season. This sparked their sunflower, strawberry and picnic inspired prints.

Regardless of the print, the dresses reflect Christy Dawn’s farm-to-closet approach. After their initial success and the influx of investors, “the dopamine hit of not being part of the problem no longer hit as hard,” Baskauskas says. “The evolution of this situation was: What would it mean to do more than just not be part of the problem? What would it mean to be part of a solution? They started their own four-acre regenerative cotton farm, which has now expanded to 80 acres.

To invite the entire Christy Dawn community to participate, they launched their land management program two and a half years ago. “You can actively finance the growth of your dress,” says Baskauskas. People invest $200 to manage 3,485 square feet of farmland and six months later the brand redeems the return in the form of store credit. “You can have a reciprocal relationship with the land and the farmers,” says Dawn Baskauskas. “We give this beautiful news every month to the farm, as if the seeds have just been sown or the cotton has started to be harvested.”

Each Christy Dawn garment is made from recycled fabrics, organic cotton and regeneratively grown materials, and made locally in Los Angeles to last. So far, the brand has regenerated 239 acres of farmland and sequestered 2 million pounds of carbon, making it a leader in ethical production globally.

While sustainability has always been at the heart of Christy Dawn, it’s the easy prints and sartorial silhouettes that have earned the brand a cult following. “Women buy our dresses because they think they will look beautiful,” says Baskauskas. “They don’t buy the dresses because they’re regeneratively grown, but that’s woven into every thread.” Dawn Baskauskas adds, “Once you fall in love with how you feel when you wear Christy Dawn, we start sprinkling in all the meaningful ways we make the clothes. I’m really proud of what we did.