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with recent designs by Armani, Galliano and Kawakubo, Smith's new takes on clothing defy traditional formal / informal categories.
Smith, who grew up in California, embarked on resist-dyeing-simple tie-dyeing around 1965 in Santa Cruz, and proved such an instant commercial success that he became a self-described production expert. Over the years,it's been his efficiency expertise that has guided his creative decisions.When he turned his hand in the mid 80s to shibori, he sidestepped the laborious Japanese traditions of this form of resist dyeing through pleating and folding,inventing Rube Goldbergian machinery to speed the process and "automate" production of his patterns. For his spotted designs, he compresses six to seven yards of |
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of black fabric into a perforated stainless steel tube, sometimes slipping in pebbles and sticks of bamboo. Then he clamps two half cylinders,both perforated, on top and injects the contraption with scattered doses of procion dye. The fabric in the center and any fabric surrounded by foreign objects resist the dye. For striped patterns, Smith wraps a length of fabric back again along a PVC base cylinder, further compressing the cloth by binding it into a tight bundle with a continuous wrap of threads that emanate from a cake-box-type tying system. After dye injection and oven heating, the fabric leaps snake like out of its bundle. Indeed, its stripes resemble the broken, irregular tracks found on boa constrictors.
Following the initial dyeing process, Smith immerses his fabric in a sodium hydrosulfide color stripper, watching intently as the solution is heated on a stove top, stopping the color-lightening process-brown into gold, mauve, then ecru-at the moment it achieves the desired shade.Next comes a rinse, followed by a black dye bath, which produces final shades of off-blacks, browns and olive drabs-the colors Smith has lately preferred.
In the early 90s, he made yet another cost-efficient discovery. He found he could pack more layers of thin silk gauze into his cylinders than he could cottons and rayons, and with the lighter fabric his output was speeded up. Soon Smith started manipulating his wildly patterned silk into |
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dresses. He fixed on bias cut, liking the way it produced great drape without complicated curved seams. (He appreciated straight edges."No puckering problems," he says.) The first of Smith's bias-cut dresses (called the A dress) went into production in 1992 with a simple rectangular shape. Gradually he added fabric inserts to lend extra shape to his designs. By the time of his Gayle Willson exhibit, he'd reached the letter K, with a dress construction that features seven diamond-shaped inserts on the front and back. Though Smith continues to design all his garment prototypes in the Nahant, Massachusetts,studio, where he moved his operation full-time four years ago, he assigns the sewing of his clothes to several dressmakers, whom he instructs to use an overlap-stitch Merrow machine, which produces both seaming and finishing. |
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