Linen is a performance fabric. Most designers just haven't treated it that way.
Associate Designer — Fabric & Materials Direction, Print Development, Retail & Trade Show Design | Men's Resort Lifestyle
Cubavera is a men's resort and lifestyle brand built on a specific cultural identity — Caribbean heritage, effortless warmth, and the kind of style that looks equally at home at a beach bar or a business dinner. Designing for Cubavera meant understanding a man and a lifestyle deeply, then building product that earns his loyalty without asking for his attention.
As Associate Designer, I contributed across the full design process — from seasonal color and mood direction through fabric selection, print development, and retail presentation. The trade show and in-store fixture work gave me direct exposure to how a collection lives beyond the design room: how it needs to communicate at shelf, how outfitting logic drives purchase behavior, and how brand identity has to hold from the hanger to the fitting room.
Sales meetings at Perry Ellis for Cubavera are key moments where upcoming collections are presented to internal partners and wholesale accounts. These meetings communicate the seasonal vision, lifestyle inspiration, color direction, and key products, helping align design, merchandising, and sales on the assortment’s commercial strategy. The presentations translate creative concepts into clear, customer-focused stories that support buy-in and drive successful seasonal adoption.
Color Palette & Mood Board
This palette is inspired by the sun-washed hues and relaxed textures of a Caribbean escape, blending ocean blues, soft corals, warm sands, and grounded neutrals. The mood board captures the balance between vibrant vacation energy and effortless sophistication—drawing from coastal sunsets, natural fibers, and everyday moments of island life. Together, the colors and imagery set the foundation for a modern Cubavera collection that feels easy, expressive, and rooted in resort heritage.
Easy Linen for Endless Summer
Linen is one of the most technically demanding fabrics to design for at a commercial level. It wrinkles, it shifts, it responds differently to dye and print than cotton or synthetic blends — and it has to be spec'd with enough precision that the final garment hits the right hand-feel without sacrificing the breathability that makes it worth wearing. I developed a linen shirt program built around ease and versatility — silhouettes that transitioned from resort to everyday wear without losing their identity.
Material direction centered on a mid-weight linen with a soft, broken-in hand, developed to an IMU target that kept the line commercially viable at accessible price points. Construction details — chest pocket placement, button stance, collar roll — were refined to reinforce the relaxed-but-intentional brand positioning.
Refined Prints on Relaxed Linen
Print-on-linen is a different discipline than print-on-jersey or print-on-synthetic. The fiber takes ink differently, the texture of the weave interacts with repeat structure, and the scale of a motif that reads cleanly on a flat cotton can disappear or overwhelm on a linen ground. I developed the tropical and botanical print direction for this program with those material realities at the center — designing prints that worked with the fabric's natural character rather than against it.
The result was a print language that felt authentically Caribbean without being costume — sophisticated enough for a man with taste, accessible enough for a man who just wants to look good on vacation.
Everyday Linen, Resort Ready
The short-sleeve linen styles offer a clean, versatile option within the assortment, designed for effortless warm-weather dressing. With a relaxed fit and breathable 100% linen, these pieces serve as everyday resort essentials—easy to wear, easy to style, and grounded in Cubavera’s laid-back lifestyle aesthetic.
From mood board to trade show floor. This is what end-to-end design ownership looks like in men's lifestyle.