Planting Tomatoes: A Lucy Dacus–Inspired Fashion Collection

Some songs create a complete visual world before I have even decided what to make.

Lucy Dacus’s “Planting Tomatoes” gave me wet leaves, bruised fruit, damp greenhouses and the particular exhaustion of trying to keep something alive. It became the starting point for Planting Tomatoes, the summer 2026 Riffhaus collection—and one of the clearest examples of how a monthly riff can grow far beyond a single piece of clothing.

At Riffhaus, I release a new riff every month. Each one begins with a woman in music and becomes an independent fashion response: limited pieces shaped by a song, an artist or the atmosphere surrounding her work. For June 2026, that musician was Lucy Dacus.

“Planting Tomatoes” is interested in what Lucy Dacus has called “the stuff of living”: the small ideas and ordinary acts that pull us back toward life. In an interview about the song, she spoke about loss, getting older and staying interested in the possibilities held by a piece of earth. That idea stayed with me.

Planting something is optimistic, but caring for it is repetitive and physical. You water. You wait. You worry that you have watered too much. Leaves yellow. Pests arrive. The heat becomes oppressive. Something rots while something else continues growing. And my city tomatoes were all taken by squirrels, go figure.

Care is beautiful, but it can also be exhausting.

That tension became the emotional center of the Lucy Dacus Planting Tomatoes fashion collection: cultivation and decay, companionship and pests, fragility and persistence. The world of Planting Tomatoes is humid and slightly melancholy—overgrown greenhouses, sun-faded seed catalogs, soil under the nails, snails crossing wet ground and tomatoes left on the vine a little too long.

Tomato girl summer, but sadder.

Later, when I saw her music video, I was actually confused because she filmed it in her hometown, with her dad and kids, all seemed happy, so now my KEEPER piece makes sense too. I tend to feel the deep emotion; I might have to go lighter is what the Lucy Dacus Planting Tomatoes fashion collection taught me. 

Rather than translating the song literally, I built a collection of physical artifacts that might belong inside its world.

The pieces included a Tomato Hornworms vest (inspired by a collector I e-mailed with), botanical Companion shorts, dark nightshade workwear and tomato-themed caps, embroidery is a new love of mine. Garden imagery appeared as something handled and lived with not as a bright, polished summer motif for my Lucy Dacus Planting Tomatoes fashion collection.

I also had to think and wander in: 

• Compost
• Snails and turtles 
• The plot architecture 
• Screened porches
• The mandrake and 
• Other companion plants

The collection’s most successful piece was also its simplest: an oversized blue pinstriped shirt called Tomatoes. I originally did not release her as part of my Lucy Dacus Planting Tomatoes fashion collection, but a collector spied her in the background of my about me image and asked for her. I was nervous because it is my first print applied via film, but so far the reponse has been very positive, and I wear her all the time.

A painted tomato vine climbs across the front of the shirt. On the pocket sits a botanical plaque marked Solanaceae and Nightshade, placing an ordinary tomato inside its larger and slightly more sinister plant family.

The shirt holds the whole riff in one object. Its familiar pinstripe suggests routine, work and utility. The tomatoes interrupt that order. They are ripe, vulnerable and a little unruly. The nightshade plaque gives the piece the feeling of a specimen, as though it has been collected from the garden and cataloged for later.

It became the KEEPER from the collection: the piece that people connected with most and the one that will remain part of the Riffhaus world beyond its original monthly release of my Lucy Dacus Planting Tomatoes fashion collection.

A tomato carries contradictions beautifully.

It is common but demanding. Soft but acidic. Technically a fruit, treated like a vegetable and related to plants with much darker reputations. A healthy vine can look almost aggressive in July, taking over its supports while still needing constant protection.

That made it the right symbol for a collection about emotional labor in my Lucy Dacus Planting Tomatoes fashion collection.

The clothes are not simply about gardening. They are about the strange intimacy of nurturing any living thing through damage, uncertainty and change. They ask what it means to remain attentive when growth is slow—and what happens when love begins to feel like maintenance.

After launching my Lucy Dacus Planting Tomatoes fashion collection on June 1, I saw Lucy Dacus perform at MASS MoCA in North Adams on July 23.

There was something satisfying about encountering the song again after living inside its imagery for months. By then, “Planting Tomatoes” was no longer only something I had heard. It had passed through sketches, garments, fabric, paint, photographs and the small decisions required to bring a Lucy Dacus Planting Tomatoes fashion collection into being.

Hearing it outdoors at MASS MoCA returned the project to music, but it also changed the way I understood the riff. The collection had started with a song about staying connected to life through small ideas. Making it had become one of those small ideas: something planted, tended, and allowed to grow into its own world. New visuals I had to bring into the riff: 

• Lucy Dacus sitting on a velvet sofa, which I turned into the hero image for this diary entry.
• Beautifully gay women. Lucy asked mid-concert: Who here is gay and 90% of the hands went up. This inspired me to think about female romance in my imagery.
• I also sat in a hot tub at the Porches Inn and met a wonderful woman who gave me a real rundown on sizing.  

Planting Tomatoes launched with a question:

Are you planting tomatoes?

It sounds domestic and ordinary, but it contains everything inside the collection. Are you caring for something? Are you willing to wait? Will you continue when the leaves curl, the insects arrive or the fruit bruises before it ripens?

The answer does not have to be heroic. My Lucy Dacus Planting Tomatoes fashion collection definitly was not.

Sometimes persistence is only watering what is still alive.

Planting Tomatoes is Sandra’s June 2026 monthly riff for Riffhaus: limited, collectible fashion inspired by women in music. This collection is an independent artistic response and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Lucy Dacus.