The story

Cue the lights and sound on a lawyer’s 180 degree pivot from law to fashion. During her 17 years of practice, Founder and Creative Director Beverly Cahill Nelson struggled with antiquated notions of female career attire. In 2018, Beverly launched BEVERLY with an eye toward changing the way the world perceives a successful woman.

As a little girl, Beverly sat at the foot of her mother’s sewing table while she painstakingly learned to sew dresses and tops from McCall’s patterns. Her mother was a transplant from Saigon, Vietnam, yet had never picked up a needle and thread until she moved to the United States with Beverly’s father. She wanted to learn how to sew because she loved classic American fashion, and she passed this passion on to Beverly, who now finds herself at the intersection of fashion and law.

The Mission

As a practicing lawyer, Beverly can affirm without equivocation that success is best expressed by one timeless uniform—the gentleman’s suit.  Neither a strut and firm handshake nor an elegant business card can compare to a fine suit as an outward display of confidence and accomplishment. The classic ensemble conjures images of achievers such as Henry Ford, Cary Grant and William F. Buckley. 

The suit shapes the way men approach their careers. It shapes the way men approach other men. And it shapes the world’s perception of the successful man. Despite the inextricable connection between a man’s character and his suit, the connection is all but absent when it comes to a woman. In the context of law, the most successful female attorneys are defined as those gals who, against all odds, make partner at the big firm. Suits for these big-firm female partners? They are black, ill-fitting, hit below the knee and are always accompanied with nude pantyhose. Suits for women function less to express success than as a means of breathing life into old-school notions of how women are expected to conduct themselves in order to get ahead. The mission of BEVERLY is to create a wardrobe for women that celebrates achievement and flies in the face of outdated ideas about how women should dress in the business world.