As part of MAKESHIFT, we collaborated on a pop-up shop with the Billy Reid team in their New York store. The shop was called ‘Crafting Fashion,’ and featured hand-crafted garments, hats, shoes, jewelry, and home décor from seasoned designers who pair fashion and craft beautifully.

We encourage you to join with crafters, makers, and artists to curate pop-up shops in your community. Find a space- or make a space, work towards creative collaboration, and share your vision with your community.

If you’ve already done so, we’d love to hear about it.

xoNatalie

We’d like to highlight each of the featured designers in our pop-up shop and say a special ‘thank you’ to everyone who took the time to ‘make’ and contribute to ‘Crafting Fashion’.

We can’t thank Billy Reid and his team enough for hosting our pop-up shop and opening event. Billy has his corporate offices near our studio @ The Factory, in the Billy Reid flagship store and studio here in downtown Florence, Alabama. He employs artisan factories in Europe and America in crafting his men’s, women’s, and accessories collections. Of course we were drawn to his quilted jackets.

Susan Cianciolo debuted her newest work at ‘Crafting Fashion’. As an artist and clothing designer, she continues to show regularly on the New York fashion calendar and maintains a strong base of private and retail clients.

Heath Ceramics displayed their new summer line, in addition to pieces from our recent collaboration. All pieces are hand-made at their factory in Sausalito, California. Catherine Bailey and her husband Robin Petravic purchased Heath Ceramics in 2003 and have built upon the work begun by Edith Heath.

Urchin necklaces from Hugo & Marie were juxtaposed against delicate plates. Hugo & Marie is an imaginative creative agency specializing in artist management founded in early 2008. They focus on direction, design, illustration, interactive, and representation services.

Imogene + Willie owners Carrie and Matt Eddmenson contributed oversized pillows made from antique Japanese denim. They have developed many modern day denim processes and finishes as well as products, fits, finishes, and branding for denim companies.

For the shop, Maria Moyer contributed pieces of her hand-formed porcelain jewelry. As a sculptor, Maria creates unglazed porcelain that she sands between firings to create a sea-shell-smooth finish.

The shop displayed handmade hats from Leigh Magar and Albertus Swanepoel. Leigh started Magar Hatworks almost 20 years ago in Charleston, South Carolina. She studied the classic hat making techniques at F.I.T.in Manhattan.

In 2006, Albertus formed his own company, Albertus Swanepoel LLC, which designs and produces handmade hats for a select number of stores in the US and internationally.

George Esquivel has spent the past 17 years designing and making shoes in California. For the past decade, he has operated Esquivel from a small manufacturing facility in Orange County, California.

Tucker by Gaby Basora was made in New York City, especially for the pop-up shop. Pieces included printed silk blouses and beautiful colorful skirts.

Kenlynn Wilson hand-produces each piece of knitwear for her line, ONE OF Collection, on non-mechanized knitting looms. We had the pleasure of having Kenlynn participate in our Sewing Workshop at the Standard East.

Alabama Chanin included both custom garments, home accessories, and pieces from our collection, including embroidered ponchos and our "Alabama Fur" coat.

("MAKESHIFT + A DIY Pop-up Shop" originally posted on the Alabama Chanin Journal)

“Craft” might seem like it’s for the amateurs, and “fashion” for the auteurs. Yet we live in an age where creativity and innovation are increasingly found in collaborations between makers and users, crafters and designers, designers and manufacturers, and in the loosening of the boundaries between them. Open sourcing and the emergence of DIY everything (from apps to dresses to education) are THE design stories of the 21st century.

If the philosophers and economists are right, such stories reflect renewed possibilities for building communities, for growing businesses, and for practicing everyday forms of enchantment, ethics, and sustainability. It is time to expand our way of thinking about the relationship between craft and fashion, between the self-made and the ready-to-wear, between fashion as intellectual property and fashion as an open source. What can we learn from the fields of music, product design, and education? Does a backward glance help us see how fashion was at the forefront of these innovations from the start? What is a Vogue pattern if not an open source? What are les petits mains other than artists?

We finished our week of MAKESHIFT with Crafting Design, a chair workshop hosted at Partners & Spade in New York City.

From the New York Times piece “Pull Up a Chair, Then Fix It” by Andrew Wagner:

“Last Saturday, as part of a conference called MakeShift, Natalie Chanin, the founder of the fashion label Alabama Chanin, held a workshop to rehabilitate some of these castoffs at Partners & Spade on Great Jones Street. The event, which she called Crafting Design, was dedicated to resurrecting the bent, twisted and broken remnants of what the poet David McFadden has described as ‘the most ubiquitous and important design element in the domestic environment’: the chair.”

Krrb provided found chairs for our day that were piled in front of the design studio. Guests picked through the random selection of chairs – ranging from your standard IKEA chair to retro, a leather chair, and a stool – then chose from mounds of fabric scraps, nails, stencils, and an assortment of tools to redesign them.

Among the “crafters” who attended were Tanya Aguiñiga, Cathy Bailey, Amy Devers, and Melanie Falick.

“Ms. Devers, a furniture designer and the star of “Fix This Yard” on A&E, was hammering nails into the seat and back of her old Ikea chair, piling T-shirt scraps on top and carefully threading them through the nail bedding, so that the material began to take on the appearance of a colorful shag rug. One lone, loose piece from the back was left to dangle gracefully to the ground.”

Saturday’s open collaboration in the design studio reinforced MakeShift’s conversation on design, craft, and DIY.

Check out “Pull Up a Chair, Then Fix It,” by Andrew Wagner for the New York Times.  And take some time this week to refurbish some of the furniture (stuff) in your own life. Or throw your own Crafting Design party.

Andrew Wagner’s knowledge of the Bloody Mary was especially helpful to the whole design process. We suggest the following recipe from page 88 of Alabama Studio Style for your own Crafting Design event:

ALABAMA’S BLOODY MARY
Serves 6-8

3 cups tomato juice (use juice leftover from canning tomatoes this summer if available – this makes all the difference in the world!)
1 cup vodka
4 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
6-8 dashes Tobasco sauce (or to taste)
Juice of 2 limes
Olives, pickled okra, or Tomolives (pickled green cherry tomatoes) for garnish

Stir all ingredients but the garnishes together in a serving pitcher, add ice, and serve.

Thanks to A.J. Mason and Jeff Moerchen for their help in rounding up tools, coordinating chaos, helping with design/build, and for bringing a general good spirit to the day.

We are planning a Crafting Design event for our studio in Alabama.
Start collecting chairs…
xoNatalie

("Crafting Design + A Bloody Mary" originally posted on the Alabama Chanin Journal)