Over the weekend I had the opportunity to attend RedLine Milwaukee’s Fusion Fashion Show fundraiser on behalf of Third Coast Style. What better way to kick off the Created in MKE blog than with an event celebrating our local fashion industry! Hosted in RedLine’s exhibition space downtown, the 22,000 square foot building also houses artist studios, a print and paper-making workshop, a computer lab and classrooms dedicated to educating and supporting Milwaukee’s creative community. Amid all this creative energy, the setting couldn’t be more appropriate for a fashion show.
The Designers’ Showcase kicked off the event highlighting designers introducing their collections. Among the list of designers featured were Redat Davison, Julia Tiedt, Aeran Park, and Kelvin Haydon. Most of the designers participated in previous RePurposed Runway competitions, so it was interesting to see a display of their ready to wear designs with a few artful pieces.
Julia Tiedt was nice enough to sit down with me prior to the show (literally an hour before hair and makeup) to speak about the debut of her line Willow Worn in collaboration with artist Zach Mory. Tiedt obtained her degree in Fashion Design from Columbia College Chicago. She met Mory waiting tables at a Chicago restaurant. Mory’s Wisconsin connection is traced to his hometown of Cottage Grove, Wisconsin as well as his alma mater, University of Wisconsin-Madison. A year in a half in the making, the artistic brainchild Willow Worn developed through mood boards, pantone books, and Mory’s pencil and marker sketches for textiles that Tiedt uses to create designs for men and women.
The moniker Willow Worn is derived from a Grimm fairytale and certainly looks whimsical enough to live up to its name. She explains, “The textile art is heavily inspired by urban decay, a blend of architectural forms and organic shapes.” I found it intriguing that they examined shapes created by mold. Yes, the fuzzy mold variety found on rotten fruit and stale bread influenced their prints! The spore-atic motif was carried through the ten designs of which there were four male and six female looks. I found her feminine pieces to be flirty, flattering, and somewhat hypnotic – the colorful prints catch the eye. My favorite was her black and white-striped cocktail dress (shown below). While her and Mory get Willow Worn off the ground, Tiedt works at the Chicago Fashion Incubator (similar to RedLine), is a part-time seamstress, and also a marketing specialist. She anticipates eventually creating for her brand full-time, expanding to provide made to order fashion and possibly a build-your-own element of selecting prints and fabrics that will involve the buyer in the creative process. When she has time, she participates in fashion competitions such as the RePurposed Runway to flex her creativity. Her memorable dress from the 2012 competition was created with recycled coffee filters.
The silhouettes of all the featured designers’ work were stunning. Kelvin Haydon’s collection concluded the showcase portion of the show. Bold prints, colors, and styles were a hit with the audience, who cheered in excitement.
The RePuprposed Runway, themed Water and the Environment, was the featured competition where designers were challenged to create themed pieces from readily available materials. Emphasis is placed on recycling. Something-from-nothing fashion was made from a plethora of materials: cassette tapes, garbage bags, plastic bottles, shower curtains, used tea bags, bottle caps, helium balloons, and human hair, among others. I admired the ingenuity and craftsmanship displayed by all the pieces, each one was its own work of art.
“Milwaukee, Sail Me to the Ocean” by Lilah Horwitz
Photograph by Julia Lazarski
I spoke with Lilah Horwitz about the creative process behind her piece entitled Milwaukee, Sail Me to the Ocean.
“I was exploring on my bike one day, and I came to the Pier Milwaukee Yacht Storage,” she explained. After a brief conversation she acquired a discarded sail, leather from a boat seat, and salvaged elastic for her three-piece dress, which was inspired by Victorian style bathing suits.
Horwitz is a Milwaukee transplant; originally from Seattle, she moved to New York City to obtain a degree from Parsons School of Design. Disillusioned by an industry of unimaginative collections and consumer-driven market, Horwitz described feeling “jaded” by the craft she had devoted her life to. Enrolling in a course called “Unfashion” reaffirmed her passion to create and stimulated her interest in sustainable and integrated fashion design. Breaking the label of designer, she considers herself a maker. Her site specific collection is the foundation of her body of work, “I want to use historical context as a primary source for my art.” Her RePurposed Runway piece takes into account her experience in Milwaukee with a touch of social awareness, citing the city’s inaccessibility to water in a town built by people of industry.
“In cities like New York or Milwaukee, water accessibility has always been limited to the wealthy who can afford a sailboat or yacht.” She confessed the piece had influence from her homesickness away from the ocean and her West and East Coast homes.
As she travels from place to place, Horwitz’s art documents her surroundings, the time and place. She is using the collection as an opportunity to experiment with the boundaries of art, fashion, and creating. Her collection was introduced via pop-up street showcase New York 129, the address of her studio. A traveler at heart, Horwitz does not plan to linger in Milwaukee long. This winter she plans on a return to New York City as well as Mexico. She patiently waits and works while her partner Nick Olson finishes a project for a landscaping company. Also a maker, Olson is a tintype photographer, builder, and woodworker. Their relationship reminded me of Charles and Bernice Eames, where their talents build and thrive together as a result of shared creativity.
Check out a short film about the building of Horwitz and Olson’s cabin in West Virginia.
There were many notable designs from the runway show. I was pleasantly surprised that everyone I spoke with before and during was adamantly supportive of RedLine and the local art scene. In a time when the “local” label is used in excess, it was refreshing to see a place exists to challenge artists, designers, and makers who are working to evolve high fashion in Milwaukee, not copy and paste trends from everywhere else. Hats off to RedLine as well as all of the featured artists. And a special congratulations to designers Dan Eberhardt and Dagmara Costello who represented Third Coast Style! Costello’s outfit “Faint Footsteps to the Past” won best usage of recycled materials!
Created in Milwaukee 