The Tears of Things

The Fashion Designers' New Clothes

Dedicated to Celia Birtwell and the spirit of Ossie Clark.

The Psychedelic Leprechaun (detail), custom-made flaménco dress by Catherine King, in progress, showing six layers of flouncing at the hem.

By Jerome du Bois, with Catherine King

It's all about the work, about doing the work.

People in this town talk big about being fashion designers. In the recent shade, for example, Amy L. Young refers to the multi-talented Indigo Verdon (no website, no images) at The Red Door, and Mykil Zep, who "does" fashion at his gallery, whatever that means. An earlier issue mentions the store Passage, and when I Googled all those people that she mentioned I got nothin', I tell ya, nothin'! Another issue covered Andy Brown and SoldierLeisure, another one Stolenshirts. It seems that any ding-dong who can silkscreen a t-shirt and cut it up gets a runway show at SMOCA. Every layout or writeup I've seen in Phoenix New Times, shade, or the increasingly vomitous JAVA touts some twit who thinks Marc Jacobs, Heatherette, Tara Subkoff of The Imitation of Christ, or Alice Roi -- or even Prada -- is the cat's ass.

Lightweights. I dress my wife in Betsey Johnson, Diane von Furstenberg, Christian Lacroix, Alexander McQueen, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, Escada -- and Jane Doe, Todd Oldham, and Paris Paris, just for fun. You know, real tailors, not retailers.

Most of these garments she leaves alone -- she just looks like a million dollars wearing them -- and some she alters. Most importantly, she makes her own clothes from the ground up, such as the Psychedelic Leprechaun (detail above, story below), an original Catherine King -- the next Vivienne Westwood if she wanted to be, in my humble opinion. Which she doesn't. She makes clothes for herself, but at haute couture level, as in those names above. Which means labor-intensive, high touch, or, in the new lingo, handcrafted. Why do any of it otherwise? She also admires the natural materials of the Brazilian Carlos Miele, the complicated multiple cuts of custom jeans-maker Henry Duarte, and the gorgeous bias-cut patterns and handmade prints created by Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell, respectively. I'm going to show you some of Catherine's work in progress; the finished stuff -- you'll just have to admire her from a distance.

The locals depend on their silkscreened t-shirts. This isn't fashion, it's graphic design, clip art cut-and-paste which really reached it pinnacle with companies like Archaic Smile in the mid '90s. Today, this kind of work is lazy. Andy Brown of SoldierLeisure in shade:

"I have a different approach to fashion," says Brown. "I'm very causal about it. I want everyone to just relax and have a good time. SoldierLeisure is a lifestyle; it's an approach that says work hard [!], maintain yourself [?], do what you like to do [thanks], be cool [oh] be real [ok] and be yourself [huh?]."

Now, please, if you will, imagine this man [?] standing next to someone like John Galliano, for whom fashion is a strange angel, insistent and incessant, one whom he wrestles with all the time; a set of visions he wore his fingers down to the bone for; a muse he slept on bare floors for. I expect he would call Andy Brown a pissant. I sure do.

[Appliqué applies to t-shirts now as well, from dumb patches and gaudy brooches to, for example, Roberto Cavalli's $2000 long-t in the latest Bazaar, "adorned with lavish Lesage embroidery . . . "]

Catherine's got a pure white McQueen t-shirt, silver-pearl-thread encrusted on the back with the master's name and double facing crescent moons. On September 11th, and in the days following, as we sat in perpetual tears before our television and watched with America our death and rebirth, Catherine sewed a ragged American flag (seen here in process), in thin strips, to the plain front of that shirt, with quarter-inch stencilled stars. Soon she'll expand it, for this third anniversary, into a replica of Jasper Johns' Three Flags, adding rows of pearls.

Next to the ubiquitous t-shirt -- she's made three others, using embroidery and letters cut out from other shirts and sewn on -- there's the inexplicable popularity of the long-sleeved, collared white shirt. She bought a good one and examined it for a while on the dress form, then decided that her first step would be the classic surrealist move: turn it backwards. Everybody's done it, from Cocteau to Gaultier to Viktor & Rolf. But from that step it becomes her own. She's hand-shirring it from the collarbone to just above the tail. By the time she's done the front will be a form-fitting breastplate of rich shirring, the back will have functional buttons, darts and a sweet swallowtail, and the long sleeves will be ruched back to the elbow, the deconstructed cuffs flaring out like white lilies there.

She's going to fuse two black skirts -- one Gaultier, one McQueen -- into an elongated GaultiQueen -- a fluted skirt tight through hips and thighs, then flaring just above the knees. Part of the idea came from Galliano's new, classical, elegant gowns at Dior. She's doing the same with a jean skirt she created from a pair of jeans (fringed like you'll see on the handbag below) and wore for over three years. Now for the next stage. Her very clothes evolve.

She made a purse from a jeans pant leg. Take a look.

Those long tassles -- self-fringe -- were even longer. They are part of the thigh of the pant leg; she culled out all the horizontal threads, then braided the tassles for the pony beads. I hammered the green caps on myself. Not only is it beautifully funky, it's functionally beautiful, safe from spillage or a dipping hand, yet without a clasp. [Help yourself to the idea, she says.]

But Catherine King also makes dresses from the ground up. One day we went to the now-defunct Pink, I think, and she found a really voluminous '60s flocked cut satin voile dressing gown, embossed with variously-sized and -colored circles. And then she took it home and . . . cut it up and stripped it. Here's a leftover flounce, to give you an idea of the layers of this thing:

How crazy can you get? Cut velvet dots, embossed satin, multi-sized and multi-colored circles (Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl; you turned it on the world) . . . She had to break up the psychedelica.

She's making The Psychedelic Leprechaun out of long, inch-wide strips and custom-piped ribbons -- with no pattern but her own body and a dress form. At the top of the page is the bottom of the dress, six rows deep of flounce, the original fabric interspersed with widths of overlayed ribbons -- triple piping! -- with three sizes of custom-made pom-pom dangles all around, sewn underneath the piping. She did it all with her two hands and a sewing machine. Here's what the body of the dress looks like up close:

The pychedelic pattern reminded her . . . She told me she was inspired by a woman she knew only as Squeak, a seamstress for the band The Shades of Joy, in the Bay Area of the Sixties and early Seventies. Squeak was influenced by Native American fancy shirts, with their colorful ribbons; Catherine was influenced by such hippie seamstresses, as well as gypsy fashion.

Because this pattern was so strong, Catherine stripped it, then sewed the strips together, interspersing them with ribbons, which she often piped once or trice; then she zigzagged over the surfaced with the machine; then hand-stitched (down the front, for example, both sides of that hot pink line) for emphasis and strength.

She has other projects going, including taking clichés like the necktie skirt to the next level. One advtantage: she has my neckties to work with. She will also make a purse out of my father's El Zaribah Shrine fez; then there's the green leather Hey Ya vest, and the metallic poncho with twelve-inch fringe, the vintage pieced Pélé (as in Hawaiian Goddess of Fire) sweater . . .

I really don't see any of those other so-called local designers doing this kind of work. Everywhere I look, I see people peddling t-shirts and miniskirts. Dilettantes. Look at what Passage features on this page. The fancy dress is merely a slip with lace overlays. Io of IoC, anyone? A dress made of three t-shirts -- t-shirts again! And finally Soldier Leisure's gimme cap with mesh (yech) back, which the article refers to with the newest oxymoron I've seen, trucker chic. I see no sense of history, no width or depth --"I found the mini skirt restrictive," Ossie Clark said. "With the bias cut you could end up with the most extraordinary patterns." -- no emotion, no imagination, and no respect for the wearer. This isn't fashion, it's . . . playtime. And it's ordinary.

I'm glad, and lucky, that I have Catherine to look at.

Posted by Jerome at September 8, 2004 04:31 PM | TrackBack