Meet Aisling Camps, the Engineer Turned Designer Bringing Subversive Knitwear to New York Fashion Week

Photo: Cesar Buitrago Mgmt

Aisling Camps took an unusual route to founding her own fashion label. Though she already has a 2023 Fashion Trust U.S. Award and 2024 CFDA Frazier Family Foundation Empowered Vision Award under her belt, the Trinidadian-born designer originally began her career in a very different field. In 2008 she graduated from Columbia University with a degree in mechanical engineering and a focus on sustainability. After entering the workforce in the midst of an economic crash, she found employment as an engineer. Though she jokingly calls it her “quarter-life crisis,” she always possessed an artistic itch. This led her to take a risk and enroll in night classes at FIT. Following her course, she experienced visa issues and returned to Trinidad. And so, Aisling Camps the label was born.

In Trinidad, Camps’s pursuit as a knitwear designer involved a new set of challenges. At home, people were not used to conceptualizing classic knitwear in the heat. There was also a lack of access to traditional materials for her chosen craft. “I was not buying any wool, or cashmere. I was buying linen and a really tightly spun cotton with texture, really dry yarns, because it’s 95 degrees there every day,” she explains. However, from these untraditional roadblocks came innovation. This mindset is still present in her designs today. The fall 2026 ready-to-wear collection aptly balanced exaggerated chunky knits with lighter, layerable pieces like an elongated tank that can be looped around the body in a multitude of ways.

A creative mindset and technical know-how certainly helped Camps approach these challenges, and her skills from engineering transferred to subversive knitwear much easier than one might think. “I nerded out on just becoming really good at this craft,” she says. The act of programming a loom felt familiar from her engineering days. The robots might have been slightly different, but much of the language remained the same. In fact, the language was so universal that her intimate understanding of the mechanics proved to be invaluable in moving part of her production to Italy.