Before New Constellations started turning heads with dreamy synth-pop and soft-focus heat, Harlee Case was already building a different kind of scene in Portland: femme, weird, welcoming, and very, very stoned.
“Females first. In cannabis there are plenty of heady bros doing things, we wanted to create a space for women and one where they felt safe to fully express themselves,” says Harlee Case, the co-founder and former Cosmic Creative director of Portland’s now-defunct but still fondly remembered Ladies of Paradise and its Lady Jays pre-roll line, now one half of New Constellations, the band carrying some of that same color, softness and emotional charge into music.
That line gets right to it.
Before cannabis marketers learned how to fake intimacy, before every brand with a pastel palette started pretending it had built “community,” there were people in weed culture actually doing the work. In Portland, for a stretch, Harlee Case and the Ladies of Paradise crew were among them. They were not selling sterile empowerment copy. They were making actual spaces. Rooms where women felt safe. Parties that felt like portals. Shoots that looked like weed had finally been handed over to girls who liked fashion, fantasy, wigs, glitter, color, softness and smoke in equal measure.
What they built did not come from trend forecasting. It came from a hole in the culture.
“The evolution of Ladies of Paradise mirrored the needs and desires of women in the industry,” Case says. “When we first began, legalization and the recreational market was new and while there were a ton of women behind the scenes working, the narrative was still very masculine and mostly ‘heady’ culture. Ladies of Paradise carved a space in the industry for women who didn’t subscribe to the stereotypical vibe that there was back then.”
Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
