Stevie Leigh, originally from upstate New York, has been sewing since she was 11. She studied fashion design in New York city, which she says wasn’t a huge jump to the city to attend school.
“I’m an environmentalist in general, always someone who made my own stuff and reused, recycled. Sustainability really piqued my interest.”
Fashion, she learned was one of the most polluting industries.
“It’s wasteful. Extra dye, all that water runoff, the water used in making the materials even when you cut the fabric just making a t-shirt. All of that extra fabric they just throw away. Between five and 10% of good material is just gone,” she says.
The world we live in, says Stevie Leigh, seems to be moving in a direction in which people are “thinking about the world in general, like H&M and their ‘conscience’ line.”
Following graduation, Stevie Leigh started working in a Metrowest Mass. tailor shop.
“All this good denim goes to waste. We just throw it out,” she says. Starting last year, she began to design clothing using the wasted material. “I make a whole bunch of apparel out of denim scraps that would have been thrown away,” she says.
The Hopkinton resident estimates she saves about 20 lbs. of denim from the shop in which she works and a few others in the area.
Her style is to dive into her work.
“I’m not someone who sketches a lot. I like to see the material, play with the material, work with it in 3D from a big bag of denim scraps,” she says. “I’m very much inspired by music in general, and I kind of have a little bit of a punk look, with distressed denim, band t-shirts and logos and stuff. They’re one of a kind. No one else is going to have them, and they’re genderless, good for a man or a woman, multifunctional, and most things are reversible as well.”
Stevie Leigh says she doesn’t bother to follow too many designers, but she looks around at current trends. Still, she says, “I kind of just go my own way all the time, regardless. I’ve always been someone who stands out.”
Andrascik’s work is functional, wearable art, she says, something you interact with every day.
“There’s a lot that goes into making a garment, just starting with finding the right material,” she says. For her, she must first sew scraps together to make usable material. “Each square is probably 4-5 inches, she says, “so you need many of those to fit a body. I catch them all together to make my fabric.”
Stevie Leigh sometimes takes the fabric right to the dress form, or she makes paper designs, creating the bodice, the sleeves, the collar. Then she must sew it together and add such items as zippers, pockets, and buttons.
“There are many steps to make custom design like I do,” she says. “I really like just being creative and just listening to whatever I want to express.”
#REMIX by Stevie Leigh can currently be found at various Arts Markets in the Boston. In fact, this summer she had a table at the artisans’ market at the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston. You can find her at the Open Studios, or online at http://itsmestevieleigh.com/ or https://www.instagram.com/ItsMeStevieLeigh/.
Issue Date:
November, 2018
Article Body: