Inside Skylar Caeles’ Studio and the Making of Ripple Shades
Skylar Caeles works like someone who’s cracked the code on how to make technology feel tender. Her studio practice fuses digital fabrication with couture-level finish, giving her pieces the kind of tactile intelligence that makes you pause mid-scroll…. It’s a new breed of haptic fashion design that wears “you” back.
She’s part of the CHRISHABANA studio, where her CAD work and design finesse have shaped custom pieces for Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour, Missy Elliott’s Coachella set, and Harry Lennix’s Tony Awards look. Her contributions have also surfaced in NYFW activations and the upcoming Phantom of the Opera revival, opening October 19. These are cultural bookmarks, and Skylar’s work has a way of slipping into them like it belongs.
At her independent studio, CAELES, she designs wearable objects that feel like artifacts from a future that remembers the past. There’s a clear affection for Y2K aesthetics with those glossy, alien curves and unapologetic silhouettes, but she doesn’t treat them like nostalgia. Instead, they’re revived with precision and reverence, reinterpreted through the lens of 3D printing and conceptual design. It’s Y2K with a pulse, not a throwback.
Take the Snowflake rings: 3D-printed, crystalline, and sharp in all the right ways. They landed a spot at Retail Pharmacy, where the blue variant sold out and had to be restocked.
Her Houndstooth Heels channel the skeletal elegance of animal anatomy, with platform soles that feel more like architectural statements than footwear. They were her first experiment in 3D-printed shoes, and they carry the kind of confidence that comes from realizing you can build anything if you understand its bones.
Angelvision, a conceptual eyewear piece, plays with perception and power. Designed with cherubs positioned directly in front of the eyes, the glasses ask the wearer to navigate the world through trust, intuition, or divine interference. They don’t obstruct so much as reroute vision, forcing awareness of the edges while obscuring the center. It’s a strange, sacred kind of seeing, like sensing something just outside the frame.
The Ripple Shades emerged from a school project and quickly became a phenomenon. Inspired by oceanic motion and shaped with fluid precision, they went viral across the fashion sphere, earning reposts online from Highsnobiety, AVNT, ap0cene, gastt_fashion, and a commission from Bree Runway. The buzz was so intense her professor personally escorted her to the head of the fashion department to chart the next steps.
Skylar Caeles makes objects that interrogate. Her work lives at the intersection of digital precision and emotional ambiguity, where 3D-printed rings feel like coded messages and eyewear becomes a test of trust.
There’s a quiet defiance in her revival of Y2K aesthetics, not nostalgia, but reanimation. Her pieces channel the chrome-slick weirdness of the early 2000s, but with new circuitry—cool, cerebral, and slightly haunted. Meaning in her work isn’t declared; it’s embedded. You wear it, and it unfolds. Not loudly. Not all at once. But with the kind of slow clarity that sticks.
