One way the team has recently put this commitment into practice is through a series of local pop-up shops. The first was launched during Fall 2025 in Belltown. On April 2, the label opened a new location in Pioneer Square. It’s within a 10-minute drive from their headquarters in Georgetown, offering a space where innercity shoppers can directly engage with the people, materials, and values behind the label.

In a moment when fashion is too often experienced through screens, this boutique-like setting fosters closer, more tactile connections. To learn more about the vision for this expansion, I spoke with Camilla about Prairie Underground’s design evolution, their experiences with local production, and what sustainability means for them today and in the future.

JeLisa Marshall (JM): In the more than 20 years that you have been building Prairie Underground, how has your design approach changed, and what has stayed the same?

Camilla Eckersley (CE): Over the past 20 years, so many things have changed, in Seattle and personally! When Davora and I started, we were essentially designing for ourselves. We drew inspiration from vintage and thrift pieces we owned, our favorite designers, and historical clothing we studied, all grounded in the very real physical realities of our working lives in Seattle. As manufacturers we worked in cold, damp workshops, hauling fabric rolls up staircases and climbing on cutting tables to draw our markers—we needed clothing that could survive tough environments.

Early on we found some core materials we’ve continued to use—organic fleece and French terry from North Carolina, organic jersey and rib knit in LA and deadstock stretch denim—that made sense for both our ideas and our climate. From there, we began building what I think of as decorative armor.

The process is still personal, but now it’s informed by our history. We have long-standing relationships with customers and friends, and a deep library of patterns and ideas. I understand more about the different ways people live in our clothes; I return often to past styles, refining and reinventing them over time. My relationship with fashion trends has also evolved as ideas cycle back and I have more distance, I feel I can play more freely with ideas.

What has stayed the same are the principles we built early on: working with sustainable, resilient, and easy-care fabrics, developing clothing as a kind of everyday uniform, making pieces that last and evolve, and producing everything here in Seattle.

JM: With Earth Month putting a spotlight on sustainability, how are these principles reflected in your work today?

CE: For anyone who loves fashion and the way people express identity through clothing, the current fashion model presents a fundamental problem. Are we allowed to enjoy clothing? Is there an ethical way to produce or even acquire new clothes in 2026? I believe the answer is complicated.

The conversation is often framed around individual responsibility, buying less, repairing more. Those are worthwhile practices, but they don’t address the scale of the problem. What is necessary is structural change. Fast fashion—built on wage theft and environmental exploitation—shouldn’t be legal to produce or import. The labor protections we’ve fought for domestically should apply to imports as well. If companies are allowed to operate outside those standards, they will, because it’s more profitable.

We need to build a different model of manufacturing—one with legal protections for workers, responsible material sourcing, and a long view of a garment’s life. At Prairie Underground, these ideas are fundamental. We produce everything in Seattle, primarily in our Georgetown factory. We source materials as close to home as possible, support organic fiber growers and organic textile manufacturing, and work within alternative business structures. Everyone here is passionate about making great clothes, and because we are directly involved, we have the time and proximity to develop ideas more thoughtfully, to make things better and to keep evolving.