When I am asked where my inspiration comes from, It is always a long drawn out answer. It comes from perfumes, music, and endless research through my gigantic library of art history, cinema, color theory, children's books, antiquated encyclopedias, glacial treatise on ornamentation, and 70's craft manuals. Take a peek into the research and inspiration that is "Czarina."
When I first started thinking of Czarina, I knew I wanted to have a strong Fabergé element. For those of you who have never heard of Fabergé, it was a jewelry company based in St. Petersburg Russia and produced all the incredible jeweled eggs for the Russian Czar and his family. The opulence of the items produced by Fabergé was paired beautifully with their sense unpretention and imagination. I also knew I would need something to keep the collection from becoming too precious, and so I decided to go with a Mod 60's feeling for the fit of the clothing. It can take me up to 6 months to complete the research for a collection, and all of this is done to music specially selected for the research portion of the project. (Watch for an upcoming blog of my research soundtrack.) I can spend days in the city library, and what seems like an eternity rolling up and down the cases of books in my studio. As you look through the gallery you will find all kinds of little treasures in the collection as well as an array of hand-drawn illustrations for allover fabric prints as well as engineered screen prints. My in-house manual Illustrator Brad Edwards draws everything the old-fashion way: dipping a single nib pen into an ink well over and over and over. Some of the drawings take two days to ink. Some of the allover prints took up to three weeks to master in digital form and the files can be up to 650 MB! When we print the runway pieces in the screen lab, some of the screen prints can be up to 8 color passes and I have to stay in the lab for hours at a time to ensure the colors are correct, and continuity is maintained. All the crystal on the runway pieces are painstakingly hand-set and can require up to 4 hours to set 250 crystals.