Designer returns to Utah for love, creates boys' fashion line

Funny how life turns out.

When she was a student at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology, Hayley Parker was interning for a designer and expecting a career in Manhattan's fashion district.

Now, though, she's Hayley Parker-Barker — married, with a young child, and creating a boys' fashion line, Culdesac, and selling it online from her home in American Fork, Utah.

"We just sort of boomeranged," Parker-Barker, 25, told The New York Times' Cathy Horyn last week. (An article about Parker-Barker ran in the Sunday Styles section.)

Parker-Barker moved back to Utah for several reasons - including the recession, and the long-simmering romance with Cameron Barker, whom she had known since they were toddlers. (Their families, separately, moved to Utah when they were kids; their first date was senior prom.) The Barkers now have a son, Ender, born in 2009.

After a stint teaching art in Utah, the couple decided to create a children's fashion line. "I just had a hard time finding non-graphic T-shirts for our son and things that didn't have trucks on them," she said. (Girls, by the way, can also wear the designs - especially if they want to avoid an onslaught of pink.)

Cameron, who is studying computer programming, designing the website. Hayley designs the looks, makes the patterns and does the fittings herself. She found Utah seamstresses via Craigslist to sew the clothes. "There's just a vast amount of local talent," she said.