Bringing down the house
CMU alumnus Ian Clark blends fashion, storytelling in design work
By Marylee Williams
On a vacation to Australia in 2018, Ian Clark knew it was time for a change.
He was working in real estate but had more creative ambitions — and anxieties about embracing them. Around the same time, the late rapper Nipsey Hussle released his "No Pressure" mixtape, and for Ian, the music's message plus being on the beaches of Australia, made him realize that he could build the life he wanted. He just needed to leap.
"I'd always wanted to come out with a clothing line, but I was scared because I thought there wasn't enough money or people wouldn't like it," Ian says. "And once I heard 'No Pressure,' I knew. I thought, 'Let's just go for it.'"
Ian returned to his Los Angeles home after his trip and founded House of Orange, a design firm focused on fashion and creative storytelling. Ian kept his real estate gig and cultivated House of Orange on the side. But all along, he knew the brand was his passion.
"I started working, and I realized that real estate was cool, but I didn't love it," he says. "So I was like, let me have something on the side that I can build and be passionate about. That was House of Orange. I created this brand and I think of it being like a marketing agency. It's this house that I can come into and each room will have different creative mediums — one room might be clothing, but another may be art or sculpting."
Ian eventually left real estate and earned his master's degree in human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science in 2023. Even though it didn’t involve fashion or marketing, his capstone project — cybersecurity work for Cisco — had definite applications to House of Orange. Working with and around other designers tackling different challenges, for example, taught him that in the design process, finding the right solution takes time.
"You're going to fail a ton, but that's good because you learn the wrong way to go and you pivot. I think once you have that mentality, you can do anything."
"I used to think that Steve Jobs and those types of people would just walk into a room and a design automatically happened, like they had a magic wand," Ian says. "But when you learn the design process, it's never like that. It's mostly iteration. You're going to fail a ton, but that's good because you learn the wrong way to go and you pivot. I think once you have that mentality, you can do anything."
A year later and back in Los Angeles, Ian was nurturing House of Orange with the design skills he honed at CMU and his business hit the international stage. Indiana Pacers point guard Tyrese Haliburton wore a House of Orange sweatshirt during a press conference for the Pacers playoff series against the New York Knicks and photos of it went viral. The black "Don't Choke" hoodie featured a picture of Pacers legend Reggie Miller making a choking gesture at filmmaker Spike Lee, a courtside fixture at New York Knicks games.
Ian says it would have been easy to try to replicate this moment and create more viral pieces of clothing. But he looked to one of his inspirations, Virgil Abloh, the creator of Off-White and artistic director for Louis Vuitton's menswear collection, and decided to build a lasting fashion brand. He knew he had to stay true to his creative decision-making and not chase trends. The only item available with the Don't Choke design is still the hoodie, which is sold out.
"I'm definitely excited this all happened with the hoodie, but it doesn't change how I've designed," Ian says. "I designed from my opinion, and people like it or they don't. I think that's the purest way to design anything because it's from a place seated in yourself."
Ian's fashion brand focuses on streetwear, and he gravitated toward this style because of his love for basketball — and his family.
"Basketball and streetwear fashion are connected, and that's always been a part of me," he says. "I also have older brothers and my mom was very fashionable, so I saw how they dressed and it had a big impact on me. I've always been into clothing."
For Ian, though, House of Orange goes beyond fashion. It's a full-service creative and marketing agency where he can explore and integrate what he's learned about design into any product. He plans to continue to build the brand even as he moves to New York City to take a design position with JPMorganChase.
Ian has released several collections through House of Orange, including this year’s Back Out West line. It's inspired by Ian's return to L.A. from Pittsburgh and the experience of being back home. But he says he hopes to one day create a collection that incorporates elements of Pittsburgh.
"I never really wore beanies and gloves back in L.A., but that's a staple for me now," he says. "I'll wear a pea coat or a nice jacket, which wasn't part of my wardrobe until I went to Pittsburgh. So that's gonna happen for sure down the line."
