Before there was a Camila Casual, there was the clothing workshop of doña Altagracia Pérez in Santiago de los Caballeros, where her daughter, Alba Luz Díaz, grew up learning the trade. It was there, Alba Luz has said, that the man she would marry first walked in as a customer, to buy clothes. In 1986 they opened a small workshop of their own. Forty years later, that workshop is one of the best-known houses in Dominican fashion.
Camila Casual is a Dominican women’s ready-to-wear house, opened in Santiago de los Caballeros in 1986 by Alba Luz Díaz. It is sold in department stores across the Dominican Republic and exported to Central America and Qatar. Camila Casual has won the Marca Dominicana prize at all five editions of the Premios a la Moda Dominicana, from 2022 to 2026. The prize is decided by a jury of figures from Dominican fashion, and in 2026 the ceremony was held at the Teatro Nacional, with prizes in thirty-two categories. SHINE magazine has called the house a benchmark of the Dominican fashion industry. On Independence Day in 2021, the First Lady of the Dominican Republic wore a Camila Casual suit to the National Congress. Today Camila Casual is sold online in the United States for the first time, through this platform, and every order is packed by the house that made it.
A family house
Camila Casual is a family business, and the family says so with pride. “Having a family that is part of the business, and a brand that is more and more the favorite of Dominican women, is my greatest satisfaction as a woman, a mother, a wife and a businesswoman,” Alba Luz Díaz told Listín Diario in 2016. She is the house’s creative director.
Her daughter, Karla María Abreu, designed her first piece at twelve. She went on to study fashion design at Polimoda in Florence and to intern with a fashion house in Düsseldorf, and in 2019 she became the house’s design director. “My mother and I make a perfect duo, her experience and my youth,” she said that year, and she was clear about her plans: to grow the family company and expand what it could become. Mother and daughter now run the development of the house’s fabrics together.
The dresses and the prints
Dresses are what Camila Casual is best known for, and what makes a Camila dress recognizable starts before anything is cut. The house designs its own prints and develops its own fabrics. “Our prints and colors make us unique, because we develop our own fabrics,” Alba Luz Díaz told SHINE in 2024. The magazine described a Dominican brand that has crossed borders carrying designs of high quality.
Each collection starts from an idea the house names. Ínsula, in 2022, drew on the craft of the people of El Morro, in Montecristi, on the country’s northwest coast. SER, in 2023, followed three women of strong character, with stones made with the Dominican artisan Carmen Matías. Rosaleda, in 2024, was built on floriography, the old language of flowers, and on the seven flowers the house chose for it, from the poppy to the gardenia. The house names its colors, too, some of them after fruit every Dominican knows: Mamey, Limoncillo, Durazno.
The family talks about quality the way people who make clothes do. Alba Luz Díaz has described the goal as pieces that stand out for their finish, and has admitted that insisting on quality is never the easy road. Karla María Abreu points to the quality of the materials and the precision of the cut, and to fabrics chosen so they resist creasing and are easy to care for. Their customers, Alba Luz has said, notice exactly that: the cut, and the quality of the pieces.
Still in the family
The small workshop of 1986 grew into a company. By 2013 its team had passed three hundred people, and it was exporting to seven markets across Central and South America and the Caribbean. Through the 2010s the house showed its collections on the runway at Dominicana Moda. When the pandemic closed stores in 2020, it turned to digital channels, and the following year it added a homewear line.
Forty years after a customer walked into a workshop in Santiago, the house that grew from it is still led by the family that built it. Its dresses can now travel as far as the women who have worn them.
