Caroline Frett

Caroline Frett, who was born and grew up in Duisburg, left the town for Berlin on the day she finished school and says, she never regretted it. 

Caroline says, she isn't the type of person that's systematically heading for the road to success. So she spent her first years in the capital with try-outs, not entirely sure what her ultimate destination would be.

She studied a few semesters of Dutch Philology, did internships at a goldsmith and at a publishing house. She started to work in a café, where she would bake the cakes.

“For a long time I thought, I would open up a café, because I love baking so much. It took me quite a while to figure out that art school could be something for me.”

She then went to the East Berlin art school KH Weissensee to study textile design. Yet after a while, she realized that the creative output in the field she was heading for, would be narrowed down strongly by the needs of the industry:

“Classic fabric designing as an employee would have meant loads and loads of flowers and leopard patterns. This was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life... and anyway, AI will take over those jobs rather sooner than later.”

After completing her degree, Caroline did some small collections with her own designs but then the economic aftermath of the pandemic hit. Prices for fabrics rose steeply and that path wasn’t economically feasible anymore for a small producer.

All the while she was looking for an occupation that wouldn't let her get torn into some mind-numbing capitalist machinery, she took up again to do drawings, which she hadn’t for years.

Her inspirations came from a source that is almost forgotten to most of today's internet audience:

“In its heyday in the early 2000s, Flickr was a goldmine for autobiographic comics. I used to follow a lot of illustrators there, even before I started to draw myself. People like Gemma Correll, with her diary drawings. The way she addresses mental health and her sense of humor have influenced me a lot.”

On her Instagram Feed, Caroline brings up her daily life as well - and her followers connect to this honest, unpolished kind of content same as Caroline felt drawn to the whimsically illustrated realness in her “Flickr-years”.

While superficially it might be all about the fun and puns, on a deeper level, Caroline’s imagery will make you smile in the comfort of witnessing someone pinpointing the kind of everyday struggle we all know and which often goes unmentioned.

It’s something about that mixture of self-reflecting honesty, a subtle sense of humor and the refreshingly explicit political stances, which often come into play as well, that makes us very happy that Caroline Frett has decided to join us with her work.

You can follow Caroline on Instagram

You can have a look at some of her artwork

You can shop Caroline’s Stuff