THE PROCESS

THE TEXTILE COMES FIRST

Every Kimonoir begins somewhere else.

A vintage quilt. A tablecloth. Curtains. Embroidery. Needlework. A ridiculous bedspread I absolutely did not need until I saw it.

I source from thrift stores, flea markets, estate sales, family attics and anywhere else beautiful old textiles have a habit of turning up. Sometimes I can spot them across a room. Sometimes I find them by touch.

I look for the thing that makes a textile impossible to leave behind.

THEN I FIGURE OUT WHAT IT WANTS TO BECOME

I don’t start with a sketch and go looking for fabric to execute it.

I start with the textile. I wash it, spread it out and look at what is actually there: the pattern, the construction, the borders, the embroidery, the damage, the strange little details somebody else might cut away.

Then I start cutting.

THEN IT GOES TO MY SEWISTS

Every Kimonoir is designed and cut by me, but I don’t make these pieces alone.

Once I’ve figured out what a textile wants to become and cut all the pieces, it goes to one of the talented local sewists I work with. They take my carefully organized — and occasionally slightly unhinged — piles of textile and turn them into beautifully constructed garments.

It’s a small, collaborative production process, built on skill, trust and a shared understanding that sometimes the weird little bit of trim absolutely does need to go there.

NOTHING NEEDS TO BE PERFECT

These materials have already had lives.

They have faded. They have been repaired. They have stains, worn edges and evidence that somebody used them before I found them. I don’t try to erase all of that. The history is part of the piece.

Even the small things can carry it forward. Many of the buttons I use came from the collection of my grandmother, a seamstress after arriving in Canada from a WWII Refugee Camp. Decades later, I’m still digging through them.

MADE TO BE LIVED IN

For all the art and absurdity, these are still clothes. And I want them worn.

That means pockets. BIG pockets. Pockets that hold your passport, your boarding pass, noise-cancelling headphones, book, tablet, phone, charger and your emergency haribo gummy bears. Or a bottle of wine.

Movement. Soft, comfortable textiles. Construction that can handle an actual life. And washable and dryable — because textile art does not have to live behind glass.

ONE TEXTILE. ONE PIECE.

Because I work with what already exists, I can’t simply order another bolt and make twenty more. The dimensions of the textile, its condition and all of its peculiarities determine what I can make from it. I strive for, and generally achieve, zero waste with my garments.

So each finished Kimonoir carries the evidence of what it used to be and what it became.

There will never be another one exactly like it.