A bit about me.

How a fashion "girl" ended up on 70 acres in the Hudson Valley and what you can expect from this Substack.

The Beginning.

I’ve always admired Karl Lagerfeld for his ability to look forward and never back. I am most decidedly NOT like that. I am one afflicted by nostalgia. In a life lead by near constant change (self inflicted for the most part, yes) I find myself often reflecting on the past as I seem to consistently find myself with so much present to compare it to. As I sit here pondering the best way to explain me and how we got here (Substack) it really is the story of a life lead by clothing.

My parents were young and broke when I was born. Like no running water or indoor plumbing poor. But they were happy and I was happy and with necessity they did everything for themselves which in turn taught me to do everything for myself including learning how to sew when I was only two years old. My parents couldn’t afford to buy us clothes so my mom made all of them. Or hand-me-downs from my cousins. That was it.

I have two very distinct memories of early childhood - one, sitting on the floor in my mom’s sewing room while she was at her machine and I was cutting scraps of fabric to make clothing for my Barbies. And two - when a new overfilled garbage bag of hand-me-downs arrived from my aunt and we spent the afternoon digging through everything. My poor mother. I of course wanted to keep it all. Even from an early age, I could imagine the person that each piece would allow me to be. A white smocked dress with shoulder ties; I would wear it while sitting on the porch swing in the summer drinking a glass of lemonade. A yellow terry cloth short with white piping would be paired with a tee shirt I stole from my dad. I wanted to cut off the bottom and wear it cropped like Baby in Dirty Dancing. I was seven.

This was also the year I started designing clothing. And the year my parents divorced. We moved a lot. I was always the poor, new kid with a single mom in the South. Not a thing in the 80s. I spent a lot of time in my head and a lot of thought dedicated to the idea that an outfit could change my identity. There were all these other people I could be. So many lives to try on.

When I was getting ready to head to college I still hadn’t fully landed on “what I was going to do with my life” And my mom, in what felt like passing said “why don’t you go to fashion school?” So I went to fashion school. And it was perfect. And I found a bit more of myself. A life even - I’ve spent the last 20 years designing clothing.

It’s funny all the little things that make us who we are. The minute moments we never realize at the time, shape us, lead us, form us. I’m 42 and have spent 40 years of that time consciously focused on clothing. I guess you could call me a clothes horse.

The Second Part.

So after fifteen-ish years in the fashion industry I bought an abandoned motor lodge on a whim and moved from the city to rural Colorado. I still remember the text I sent to my girlfriends “I got a puppy… and a hotel!”. Everybody was like “What the actual f*@$ are you doing?!” To be fair, the place was pretty rough. It had been abandoned for decades and when I bought it was home to a few stray cats and a whole lotta pigeons. There was actual grass growing INSIDE the building. But I loved it, and I learned that designing and building a hotel wasn’t much different than designing and building a clothing collection. I was able to challenge myself in new ways and essentially put myself through MBA bootcamp in the process. It was simultaneously the most rewarding and most difficult four years of my life. In 2022 we sold everything - business, house, boat (not kidding) and moved ourselves, two dogs, and three cats across the country (again) to New York where I bought another abandoned building (still not kidding.) My poor husband.

And that is where we find ourselves today my friends. Slowly restoring this old farm/house. Raising our little family - those with two legs and four. And designing the next stage of life.

I’m back in the fashion industry officially (though let’s be honest I never really left.) And I get to live this incredibly amazing life between NYC and our upstate farmhouse. I mean, if you told the little girl in small town middle-of-nowhere that she was going to be a designer in NYC one day - well I’ll be damned! Life is amazing.

So what will we talk about here?

A bit of this a bit of that. I’d like to examine the why behind our sartorial choices, and yes, sometimes it’s just because it looks cute. We’ll talk about young motherhood and how that changes how we see ourselves. I’ll share stories of the clothing that I made and the clothing that made me. And hopefully hear from you as well. This industry of ours is one of the oldest, right up there with sex and alcohol, death and taxes. At the end of the day, we’re all going to get dressed. So let’s talk about it.

Toots,

Jess