Equihua’s sleepwear line goes deeper than pajamas. It’s ‘Dreamware’

Years ago, there was a recurring dream that fashion designer Brenda Equihua couldn’t shake. In the dream, there was always a flood. Sometimes, she was the one being swept away; other times, she was looking from above as friends and family were caught in floodwater. No matter what she did, the swirling water suffocated her and everything she knew.

The dreams perplexed and somewhat scared Equihua, who couldn’t figure out what they might mean. Until her mom appeared. Equihua’s mom passed away in 2013 but she appears in her dreams, often with a message. This time, she was floating atop the floodwater, eyes closed and peaceful despite the chaos.

“I felt like she was telling me, surrender,” Equihua says. “Don’t try to stop it. Even if you’re scared, you can’t stop it. Let life flood you and be at peace with that.”

The floods, she realized, represented her overwhelming desire to control the uncontrollable aspects of her life. By listening to her mom and letting go, she could better handle her life. She then thought, “What might happen if I listened to my dreams more and let them guide me?” Since seeing her mom, the floodwaters have stopped in Equihua’s dreams. But that hasn’t stopped her dreams from influencing her life and work.

“I wasn’t thinking I want to design pajamas. I was thinking about creating dreams.”

Equihua founded her namesake fashion label in 2015. Her brand rose to prominence thanks to her innovative cobija jackets, which used culturally-loved San Marcos blankets as material. The result was a comforting yet bold intersection of Mexican heritage, nostalgia and streetwear. Her work has been worn by the likes of Bad Bunny, Kehlani and Rauw Alejandro, among a slew of other stars.

Often at the crossroads of memory and artistry, Equihua’s story-rich designs start with a vision. Past designs have come to her suddenly and vividly, from car rides to conversations, usually resulting in her working to execute this specific imagination for hours on end. The Santa Barbara native says that over the brand’s 10 years, she’s gotten better at “embracing her crazy.”

“My mom’s lessons to me growing up impacted my work and how I treat the world,” Equihua says. “Because now these visions, these ideas, I learn to trust that they came to me because they’re for me and it’s my job to be the translator of this thing.”

I meet Equihua next to a waterfall, in the lush patio space of Jackson Market and Deli, a house-turned-shop nestled in the Culver City neighborhood. Equihua’s thoughts moved as fluidly as the stream beside us, from the waterlogged memories of her past to the buzzing excitement for where her dreams are leading her next.

She had just finished teaching art to teenagers at Culver Park High School, a pursuit she’s picked up alongside her design work. Youth informs her most evocative and personal designs. Her childhood is an endless gold mine to draw from and build upon, and in her work, she tries to reconnect people to childlike joy.

Zariya wears Dreamware by Equihua Amethyst Crystal sleep cami bias dress and Rebeca Equihua hoop earrings. Katherine wears Dreamware by Equihua Malachite Crystal pajama shorts set, vintage necklace, and her own earrings and bangles.

Armor wears Dreamware by Equihua Red Garnet Crystal pajama set.

“Something that feels really important to me in my designs is that people feel closer to themselves,” Equihua says. “So much of feeling closer to ourselves, I think, is an act of remembering, which for me is childhood. When we’re kids, we just trust ourselves. You would make a drawing when you were a kid and be like, ‘I’m an amazing artist.’ I want to reconnect people to that trust.”

Equihua’s trust in herself is what led her from a scholarship at Parsons School of Design to an in-house designer for luxury womenswear brands to leaping headfirst into her own label. It’s what led her, laying in bed and dreaming of her ideal pajamas, to design a pair for herself.

Once upon a time, Equihua scoffed at the idea of designing pajamas. She, too, had fallen under the spell of believing that they were plain and shapeless. Her disillusionment began when she was fresh out of college, interviewing for a pajama company.

“All the pajamas were so horribly ugly,” she says. “I started thinking, ‘I don’t want to design pajamas if they’re like this.’ But now that I have my own brand and I can do whatever I want, I’m like, ‘I could design the kind of pajamas that I want to see in the world.’”

Equihua is reimagining the frumpy image of the adult pajama, afterthought cotton shirts and old worn-in lover’s shorts that would never see the light of day. She wants to create a world with her designs where pajamas have a purpose, bringing calm and focus to the wearer as they indulge in the most important part of their day — sleep. In sensuality and in comfort, Equihua creates pajamas from and for dreams.

“I’ve started to think a lot about how the world is so focused on productivity. We’re focused on the waking world. It’s all about the morning routine. But we don’t really talk about the wind-down,” Equihua says. “I was inspired to create from that moment: Clearing our energy, clearing our mind and a certain level of appreciation for life. Tomorrow’s a new day, where you can dream something new.”

During dreams, Equihua’s connections form and she sees things like never before. She has hundreds of journal entries of her dreams, which she returns to and references often. In creative work, dreams are her muses and her lens through which to see her visions more clearly.

“This subconscious comes to life because it’s not constrained,” Equihua says. “A lot of stuff we push to the back of our brain. We don’t want to think about it. We’re suppressing a lot of things. In the dream world, we don’t get to do that. We’re no longer in charge.”

On the surface, sleepwear seems like a hard turn from where Equihua as a brand has carved its space. But look closer, and you’ll notice that Equihua’s work has always had a theme of comfort.

The morning of the photo shoot for her new sleepwear line, Dreamware, Equihua was in her apartment, surrounded by colorful organized chaos. Papers and fabrics lined tables as she and her sister inspected a pair of entirely handmade wings they had devised from tubes, feathers and even car parts.

They were tackling how to avoid costume-like shoulder straps when her sister remembered a car magnet she had in the back of her truck. The wings were born, attached to a wide elastic waistband Equihua had from a former project.

Equihua’s inspiration for the wings were once again rooted in childhood, drawing upon the feminine dark fantasy illustrations of artist Amy Brown, queen of early-2000s fairies.

“Even though a lot of the work is from my memories, I’m also thinking about crafting our future memories. Because when we dream, we’re trying to create a future memory too,” Equihua says.

In the dining room, makeup artist Gabrielle Alvarez delighted in thoughtfully placed pops of color and galactic shimmer.

Crystals, in spirituality, help their user to direct energy. What if pajamas can do the same? What if we could sleep more purposefully and use fashion to direct the tone of our sleep?

“Could we do it a little more alien? I want them to look out of this world,” Equihua directed her.

We met each other again in the lush trees of Griffith Park, wandering off the trails and into beds of fallen leaves and twisted branches. The Equihua crew was easy to spot as massive, colored wings peeked through the trees.

Dreamware by Equihua is made up of three silhouettes, a cami bias dress, a short sleeved pajama set and a long sleeved pajama set, inspired by amethyst, malachite, and red garnet crystals and with three unique prints for each crystal, which Equihua thinks of as three separate personalities.

Crystals, in spirituality, help their user to direct energy. In Dreamware, Equihua asks: What if pajamas can do the same? What if we could sleep more purposefully and use fashion to direct the tone of our sleep?

There in the forest, the models seemed at home as fairies in pajama gowns with swirling prints and pops of light. Their wings, in shades of lavender, green and red, represented certain crystals and traits: amethyst as one of calm and purity, malachite as one of protection and rose garnet for healing and love.

“I wasn’t thinking I want to design pajamas,” Equihua said of the line. “I was thinking about creating dreams.”

As she watched the models lounge, leap and twirl their pajamas in the daylight, Equihua mused that she had the feeling of being in a dream.