The Elise

Right after I launched CB Grey, a friend of Lauren's happened to be in town from New York. Her name was Elise Lyon. She was gorgeous, I desperately needed photos, and so I asked a woman I barely knew to spend an afternoon modeling scarves for a brand that was about five minutes old.

She said yes. That one afternoon put her in some of CB Grey's earliest photos — and turned one yes into years of her being part of this brand's story.

She was also the first artist whose work I ever brought inside a design. Elise builds her paintings in layers — mulberry fibers, paper, acrylic, handmade paper paste — stacked into images with a childlike, nostalgic pull, all of it guided by the philosophy of wabi-sabi: beauty in imperfection. Finding grace in the flawed and the unfinished.

Translating that to silk meant letting the scarf work the way her paintings do. One of her signature faces sits at the heart of the design, ringed in a hand-drawn sunburst. Organic shapes settle in around it — not symmetrical, not tidy, balanced the way nature is balanced. The colors and textures come straight from the richness of her canvases, layer over layer, so the finished piece feels less like it was printed and more like it was built. And woven into the silk, her philosophy in three words: beauty in imperfection.

That phrase does double duty. It describes her art — and it's an instruction to whoever wears it. The flawed parts, the unfinished parts, the parts you'd edit out if you could? That's where the beauty lives.

It remains the only scarf in the collection built around another artist's work. In 2023, we collaborated again on the CB Grey x Elise Lyon collection, which brought CB Grey its first-ever silk caftans.

Model. Muse. Collaborator. Every brand has people who helped it become itself. Elise was one of the first.