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.”
That mattered. It still does.
Because for all the talk about cannabis becoming mainstream, the early legal era was full of stale visual language and tired assumptions about who weed was for and how it was supposed to look. A lot of “culture” was still coded male. A lot of cool was still filtered through glass art machismo, grow-room seriousness, and a kind of studied roughness that left plenty of people out.
Also read: What Do Stoner Girls Carry in Their Purse? We’re Here, We’re Hot, We’re High AF
Ladies of Paradise walked in wearing platform boots and said: no thanks.
“Through being our authentic, fashion-forward, wild selves, we gave women permission to do the same and normalized cannabis for the girlie pops,” Case says.
That sentence may sound playful. It’s also a mission statement.
Originally, Ladies of Paradise was supposed to something else. Then real life intervened, which is often where the good stuff starts.
“Originally, Ladies of Paradise was going to be a blog and in meeting our girl Leighana, we decided to host a launch party for the blog, it was at that moment it clicked that this is needed.”
The thing they made was never just a product line. It was a visual language. A social code. A permission slip. And like most real scenes, it sharpened itself through nights out before it ever turned into a business model.
“Our Cowboys vs. Aliens party unintentionally became the blueprint,” Case says. “Crazy and fun themes with weed aplenty and free to all guests, these theme parties became the catalyst that continued to push Ladies of Paradise forward and into the limelight which led us to more photoshoots and eventually into branding, marketing, event planning, and various other creative endeavors for cannabis companies and accessory brands.”
That blueprint did not begin and end with aesthetics. The looks were part of it, sure. So were the wigs, the colors, the gowns on farms, the feeling that cannabis no longer had to be framed through the same stale masculine lens. But what made it real was the part that could not be mood-boarded.
At the center of the whole thing were a few rules.
“Females first.”
“Genuine connection and making people feel seen.”
“Fun. Have fun, wear a wig, don’t take life too seriously.”
That’s Harlee’s own shorthand for what mattered most when Ladies of Paradise was in full swing. Not optimization. Not audience segmentation. Not over-polished lifestyle aspiration. Safety. Visibility. Play.
And when it came to measuring whether an event actually worked, the metric was not some fake notion of “engagement.”
“Feedback and messages from the community,” she says. “Connection was key for us. Making people feel seen and building an actual community, not just throwing an event to make money, but genuinely wanting to uplift women in the industry at a time when they needed that support.”
That distinction hits harder now because weed has spent the last few years getting very good at faking sincerity. Plenty of brands know how to borrow the look of femme culture. Far fewer know how to build the conditions that make people feel held inside it.
Case has a clean read on the difference.
Her green flags for genuinely femme-forward culture are direct and unsentimental: “Transparent action: not just saying ‘we support…’ but taking action on the beliefs stated and being transparent about those actions.” Also, “Connection with the leaders: Direct connection with those hosting the event or holding the space?” And maybe the biggest one: “The people in the space. Is the space actually a safe and sacred container when you attend.”
The red flags are just as sharp: “Over hyped marketing and tokenism that has no substance or action behind their statements.” “Caring about aesthetics only but not working with organizations or activists within the femme space.” And one line that could probably be applied to half the market: “Lux packaging and shitty actual products.”
There it is. Whole TED Talk, six words.
The point here is not that Harlee once worked in cannabis and now makes music. That would be too small, too neat, too LinkedIn. The more interesting story is that she learned how culture actually works in weed, then carried those lessons somewhere else.
With New Constellations, that same emotional and visual instinct shows up again, only now in song form. In the band’s pastel universe. In the soft electric glow of its imagery. In the warmth of its fan connection. In the refusal to build at a distance.
“I think I got to flex my visionary muscles,” Case says. “Having larger-than-life dreams and learning to assemble strong teams around me that I knew could aid me at getting there. I’ve always chosen to hire friends who had talent over professionals who had experience. It’s always made each leg of the journey that much more fun and worthwhile because I’ve always worked with my best friends and learned alongside them as we accomplished goals.”
That is not only sentimental. It is structural.
A lot of the same people from the LOP orbit are still there, now helping power New Constellations behind the scenes. Case lays it out plainly.
“Behind LOP was truly a group of best friends giving their absolute all to make a business they loved work,” she says. “Through it all I’m most proud of the work we did with each other on ourselves and our relationships to each other in really really challenging situations. We built a life long relationship to each other. I still live with one of the LOP girls, Alisha, and Keke and Leighana are on the NC team. Keke Browne is basically the creative director of the visual part of the band and Leighana has been tour managing, book keeping, and a ton of admin for us. Lucky for Jade she’s off being a mom in Costa Rica but still flies in for shows and will always be one of our biggest supporters. At heart we will always be LOP girls.”
That may be the truest quote in the whole interview.
Because beneath all the color and softness and feminine magic, the real engine was work. Admin. Logistics. Bookkeeping. Team trust. Fair pay. Showing up. Keeping the lights on.
“Keeping the lights on. Constantly pivoting with the market to stay compliant. Hustling for new clients and making sure we were doing everything legal and compliant by that specific state and their laws. There was so much behind the scenes always.”
So yes, the aesthetic mattered. The glitter mattered. The costumes mattered. The dream mattered. But none of it floated. It was built by women grinding, improvising, paying collaborators first, and trying to preserve joy without becoming a parody of it.
“We would always pay collaborators, creators, and influencers first, before ourselves, every time,” Case says. “This meant not getting paid personally sometimes but this was crucial to us.”
That ethic still echoes in New Constellations, a project that seems to understand something a lot of musicians and weed brands alike forget: if people feel the room was built for them, they come back. If they feel seen, they tell their friends. If they trust your taste, they trust your next move.
Case says the band is gearing up for a first album, North American touring, Europe, bigger rooms, bigger live production, more moving parts. But the core ambition is still emotional.
“We like our fans to leave with hope,” she says. “We don’t want to tell them where to spend that hope but just encourage them to have it and do what they please with it.”
That feels like the right ending, and maybe the right thesis too.
Harlee Case helped build a corner of cannabis culture where women could arrive loud, weird, feminine, high, safe and fully themselves. Now she’s doing something similar through music. Same instinct. Same architecture. Different medium.
First, she helped weed get prettier. More open. More alive.
Now she’s teaching music how to feel like that too.
