The up-and-coming T-shirt brand Drink The River (DTR) started when a group of young Oxford natives joined to celebrate their hometown’s landscape. Its designs feature cultural touchstones of Oxford and the state of Mississippi that highlight Southern identity.
Seven Oxford-based individuals founded the company, including University of Mississippi graduates Haihai Fisher, Caroline Kincaid and William Carrington, as well as Jack Green, a graduate student at Mississippi State University. Current UM students Catherine Creekmore, Ellis Farese and Kesler Smith also co-crafted the company.
The name, Drink The River, was inspired by the Cowpasture River in western Virginia, where the friends visit frequently.
“It’s gorgeous, and it’s one of America’s cleanest rivers, something to drink from,” Green said. “Largely, it’s our vision and our picture of what Mississippi and the South are.”
This name was metaphorical and symbolic of Mississippi and Southerners’ sometimes complicated relationship with home, according to Farese.
“We’re not drinking the river water literally … but we’re swimming in it, sleeping by it, watching it and appreciating it,” Farese, a senior creative writing major, said. “It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with feelings surrounding your home. To us, Drink The River is an attempt to consolidate those feelings of overwhelm. … To ‘Drink The River’ is to acknowledge and appreciate what we have access to in our home in the South and to share it with others.”
DTR’s concept was based on the idea of keeping Oxford locals close to home and close to each other.
“We (the founders) were talking in early 2025 and trying to think of something to do to stay connected to home and to each other,” Farese said. “Some of us were about to graduate and some of us were about to enter our last year, so we came up with DTR.”
Smith, a senior Southern studies major, said the company’s creative intention is to shape others’ perspectives on the South.
“We created the company based on our feelings about the South and the way the rest of the world views it,” Smith said. “We all wanted something we could do together that gave us an outlet creatively, but it also gave us a chance to talk about the geography and history of the South.”
Smith also expressed the team’s hope for exploring Oxford’s identity outside of the university.
“As all of us are Oxford natives and Ole Miss students or graduates, we find that a lot of things are university-centered,” Smith said. “We wanted it to be more Oxford-based for the local experience but also for college students to know ‘the real Oxford’ and the place outside of campus.”
In summer 2025, the brand released three T-shirt designs in a variety of colors, featuring a crawfish, dueling deer and a map of Lafayette County.
Fisher, DTR’s main designer, detailed the creative influences for the brand.
“With DTR being very focused on nature, the seasons also play a large role with the first summer drop with imagery like deer, crawfish and swimming holes,” Fisher said. “We want to operate Drink The River as a living and changing thing, much like the natural world we aim to depict.”
Smith described the group’s decision to use T-shirt designs as their creative outlet. Team members built screen printers and created the shirts together.
“We decided to make T-shirts because we thought it was one of the more fun ways to break into what we want to eventually do with Drink The River, which is still up in the air,” Smith said, “I think it’s the foundation for a really creative group of people to have an outlet.”
DTR promoted and sold their designs at local art markets such as Chicory Market’s Holiday Open House and the Water Valley Art Crawl in hopes of boosting community engagement.
“We were really happy to have Chicory Market be our first place to sell in person,” Farese said. “We want to have something that holds value besides just being a material item but something that can connect people to the South and to home. It was really wonderful to talk to people about what we’re doing and why we decided to do it.”
Fisher described future plans for DTR and the hope for more community involvement for the brand.
“We definitely hope to smoothly scale the brand through more designs and a larger audience, as well as to find more opportunities for community engagement,” Fisher said. “With such a big part of DTR’s identity being centered on Mississippi and the South, we want to be able to help support the place that has raised us and are excited to find these opportunities in our second year of business.”
Editor’s note: Ellis Farese was an arts and culture staff writer for The Daily Mississippian in fall 2023.
