Mia Vesper is entering a new chapter in her career as a designer, looking to slow down and hone in on her design process while creating fine-crafted apparel and jewelry.
The fashion designer is shuttering her namesake ready-to-wear label and introducing Vesper Obscura, a new iteration of her brand that continues her commitment to sustainability and her design process of working with unique vintage tapestries.
Vesper launched her namesake label in 2017 as a made-to-order brand that created apparel out of vintage tapestries. Her pieces developed a steady fan base and received growing interest thanks to Beyoncé and 60 of her dancers wearing custom Mia Vesper in her “Black Is King” visual album in 2020. She later introduced ready-to-wear to meet her growing customer base and sustain her business.
Mia Vesper
Noa Griffel
“I thought that maybe starting a ready-to-wear brand would help me touch more people and be able to make more money — and it did,” she said. “But, I got stuck in this cycle of these opportunity cost conversations with myself, like ‘OK, if I make this to order and I make it in New York and employ people in New York, maybe it’s worth what I’m doing.’ I would have those conversations over and over again, but the scale of my business got too big and unwieldy for me to be able to continue to argue the point with myself.”
Vesper said she reached “a fever pitch” personally and professionally with the ready-to-wear brand and realized that “my life was just not in a place that I wanted it to be” and “my career was not what I had envisioned for myself,” so she decided to change directions and launch Vesper Obscura.
A Vesper Obscura dress made out of vintage tapestry.
Noa Griffel
Vesper Obscura will operate mostly on a made-to-order model, with the designer continuing to create dresses and separates out of vintage tapestries. She will also continue her successful jewelry business, which earned her a nomination in the jewelry category at the 2024 Fashion Trust U.S. awards. The line is created with semiprecious stones and upcycled glass.
The designer is also closing her 1,000-square-foot store in New York’s Lower East Side, which she opened last April. She made the move, she said, because she is shifting her strategy to focus on direct-to-consumer through her e-commerce site. However, Vesper did express interest in selling her jewelry via wholesale channels in the near future.
“I really wanted to be someone when I started in fashion, and now that’s at the bottom of the list,” she said. “I just want to make something that I love, that I know is worthwhile to other people and go to bed and wake up the next day and be healthy and happy and be able to visit my niece. That’s what I want to do. I don’t want to be anyone else’s creative director or anything like that. I just want to have this brand for the rest of my life and have it be solvent and fun.”