







Disruptive Camo
2024-ongoing
“Frankly, I make clothes for women to look sweet. I like sweet women. I see women’s role in life in the light of sweetness. Men should be the hunters. Women are the keepers of the hunters: it’s a straightforward, set philosophy of mine.” - Laura Ashley
The popularity of tradwife influencers (Hannah Neelman of Ballerina Farm, Nara Smith, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, etc) is part of the conservative backlash to feminism. Laura Ashley, a Welsh designer famous for her romantic floral prints and feminine designs with a bucolic feel, was the tradwife influencer of her time. Like today’s tradwife influencers, she contradictorily promoted the idea of women as submissive wives and mothers while working more than full-time and being the breadwinner. Also like today’s tradwife influencers, she believed in the universality of her own exceptional, mostly white, cis-gendered experience.
Hunting camouflage is meant to render a person invisible while hunting, but wearing it has become a fashion statement in rural areas to show off one’s masculinity and dominance over nature. Laura Ashley florals and hunting camo are both all-over botanical prints that declare where the wearer belongs. Men in hunting camo belong in the woods, dominant over nature and women. Women modestly dressed in Laura Ashely floral prints belong at home caring for their husbands and children.
To interviewers, Laura Ashley would say, “I’m just a housewife.” Her husband wrote, “Through all the excitement of these years Laura always remained a private person—my wife above all. Nearly always she was home first in the evenings to make tea or to have dinner ready before I arrived, and she always wanted to hear about my day, my achievements and prizes, before we talked about hers.” Her colleagues described her as a workaholic. Similarly, contemporary tradwife influencers have teams producing their social media content and doing manual labor on their farms/homesteads. They monetize their social media presence through ads, selling products, ebooks, and more.
“Disruptive camouflage” is a type of camouflage that uses patterns and color to hinder detection or recognition of an object's boundaries and/or other conspicuous features of its body. It involves the manipulation of the perceptual processing of its viewers. In my Disruptive Camo Series, I design new patterns that merge Laura Ashley florals with Realtree hunting camo and use them to make gender stereotyped artifacts and clothing such as hunting coats, hunting hats, skirts, aprons, ruffled curtains, wallpaper, upholstered furniture, and more. Hunting Blind, for example, combines a hunting blind used for hunting deer with a Laura-Ashley-style ruffled canopy bed made with one of my patterns printed on ripstop nylon. Like “disruptive camouflage”, my artworks confuse common perceptions to subvert false binaries about gender, class, domesticity, and nature.



