CAMILLA WELLTON · DIARY
By Camilla Wellton
You put on a coat, look in the mirror and recognise something you wanted to feel. Perhaps it gives your shoulders a little more presence. Perhaps the shape around your face feels private, or the sweep of the hem makes you want to walk somewhere. You have dressed for the day. You have also made a choice about how you would like to inhabit it.
I have always seen clothes as the exoskeleton of my psyche. They help me maintain a self-image I desire for myself, one that can change with my mood, what I need to strengthen, how I want to be perceived and with whom I want to connect.
Some days I want a clear outline. On others, I want softness, play or a sense of space around me. These desires can belong to the same person. I am interested in clothes that let me stay in contact with that changing inner life and give it a visible, physical form.
I started making clothes when I was five. Long before I had the language for it, making was a way of strengthening my connection with myself. As I grew older, I understood that connection as an expression of self-love.
The colours, cuts and choices became ways of extending my awareness into the things I wore. I built clothes around energies I wanted to remain in touch with, knowing the pleasure of putting on something I had made and feeling more in love with myself. That desire grew to include the woman who would wear my work. I wanted her to discover that pleasure too.
There is a form of magic in having a feeling and expressing it in something you can then dress yourself inside of. The feeling becomes a shape. The shape becomes material, seams, an opening for your head, room for your arms. Something that began privately can accompany you into the street.
I think this makes fashion one of the most practical forms of art. You live inside the work. It travels with you, touches your skin and takes part in ordinary decisions about where to go and how to be there. It is art, and it is technology: a way of giving intention a form you can use.
I have practised yoga since I was fifteen. I owned a yoga studio and stopped teaching at thirty because I wanted to focus on my fashion brand. Yoga never left my life. Yoga and meditation have been central and pivotal to the creation of all my collections, as has science fiction.
They meet in my interest in what can be experienced and what can be imagined. Paying attention to the body gives me somewhere to begin. Science fiction gives me room to ask what else might be possible. A silhouette can hold both: contact with the person wearing it and an invitation to inhabit a different possibility.
That relationship helps explain the continuity in work that may appear, from the outside, to have changed subjects.
I took a break from fashion in 2017. The expression had room to change, moving into music production and accessories, then into the body of work I call I AWAKE, which I began developing in 2021. I founded Sensual Institute in 2024. The complete series of The Sensual Hero’s Journey was published on 30 September 2026.
I AWAKE also brought into being the wider work of the Swedish Institute of Inner Technology. Across the books and the institutes, my attention has expanded from my own relationship with myself to the ways our selves affect one another.
I think of humanity as a self at another scale. We are individual people, continually mirroring and reinforcing one another. What I make can become part of somebody else’s self-image, their willingness to express a preference or their way of meeting another person. Taking that into account has become one of the foundations of my work.
The coat is still there. So is the person looking in the mirror. My interest now includes what happens when she steps away from it and enters a world full of other people doing the same.