The Lauren

The Lauren had to be a garden. There was never another option.

Lauren — Lala, to me — has been my best friend since we were seven years old. Sister is honestly the better word. I'm the godmother of her son, Phillips; she's the godmother of my son, Grey. At this point, the paperwork is a formality. We grew up side by side and all over the map — the Cayman Islands with her mom at thirteen and sixteen, South Africa with my dad at sixteen — and thirty-four years later, she's still the first person I call in both directions: the wonderful news and the terrible.

And nobody — nobody — has shown up for CB Grey the way Lala has. In the early days, she came to shows with me and stood for twelve hours straight, selling scarves and working her magic, refusing to let me pay her a dime. She remains the biggest CB Grey fan on the planet, and she probably wears the scarves more than I do.

But here's why her design was never in question. Lala loves flowers — and it isn't a preference, it's an inheritance. Her love of flowers, of making everything around her beautiful, came straight from her mom, Cheryl. Flowers are how that family passes love down.

So The Lauren became the garden she grew up in — laid out, literally, like a formal garden seen from above: eight beds of soft hydrangeas and delicate blooms arranged around a center medallion, all calming blues and whites. Her serenity. Her warmth. Her mother's garden, handed down a generation and printed on silk.

Cheryl has her own design now, and her own story — you can read it here. Mother and daughter, side by side in silk, the way they always were in life. That detail means more today than either of us could have known back then.

So here's to Lala. Coco loves you always.