April 2007: Cover story
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Fashion
statement
 Anna Cohen trained in Italy and her eponymous clothing line is attracting international attention. Photo by Stuart Mullenberg |
And, for the most part, these clothes don’t resemble
raincoats or tracksuits.
“People tell me ‘I really love your clothes but
they’re not Portland,’” says Adam Arnold, a
35-year-old maker of classic-inspired men’s and
women’s clothing.
Arnold moved from Seattle back to his hometown of Portland in
2002, where he found more inspiration and a better market.
While he doesn’t have the ambition to expand his line
beyond what he can sew himself, he sees the potential for those
who do.
“In Portland there is a new design sense that is growing
and building. That’s what’s exciting to me,
that’s what keeps me here: the possibility of something
new,” Arnold says. “Any designer who isn’t
taking full advantage of that possibility is completely stupid
right now.”
Portland offers a thriving scene of independent boutiques and
designers, low overhead and a growing global reputation as a
creative and sustainable hub. The Art Institute of
Portland’s apparel design classes continue to swell
— there are 300 students in the program — and in
Corvallis, Oregon State University has the only master’s
and Ph.D. programs in apparel design west of the Rockies.
It’s impossible to say how many fashion designers are
working in Oregon. There’s no one association and many
are fiercely independent, but evidence indicates their numbers
are growing.
“Portland has become a mecca” for young designers,
says Leslie Burns, chair of the department of design and human
environment at OSU. “It really is becoming known in terms
of the fashion world.”
Burns, lead author of the textbook The Business of Fashion: Designing,
Manufacturing and Marketing, which is used at 65
universities and design schools, says she measures a
city’s fashion quotient by one main indicator:
shopping.
“I find things in the boutiques as well as stores like
Mario’s that I can’t even find in Seattle,”
Burns says. “I’d rather shop in Portland than any
other city.”
Most industry watchers trace Portland’s boutique boom to
Seaplane, which opened on Southeast Belmont in 2000. Seaplane
was DIY Portland at its best, with reconstructed vintage
clothing and edgy fashion shows. Seaplane sold, still does, the
work of 10 or so local designers and has made it onto the radar
of some national magazines and into the itinerary of
fashion-seeking tourists.
In 2005 Seaplane moved over the river and onto Northwest 23rd
Avenue in an effort to get in front of more deep-pocketed
shoppers. Kate Townsend, who co-owns Seaplane with Holly
Stadler (both also sell their designs on the racks), confesses
to being tired of hosting the fashion shows they made a name
for themselves putting on.
Townsend looks over the white-walled shop and the modest
inventory of artful clothing in muted colors and says
she’s satisfied with how things are going with Seaplane.
She doesn’t have an itch to sell her clothes to a wider
market. “I like the creative process,” she
says.
BUT IN THE POST-SEAPLANE ERA it’s all about exporting the
Portland look.
“I want to put Portland on the map
internationally,” says Cohen. She’s seated in her
small, dimly lit studio near the intersection of Martin Luther
King Junior Boulevard and Northeast Alberta Street talking
about her incredibly busy February.
Cohen’s line is made with environmentally friendly
textiles — she wants her clothing to be the “canary
in the coal mine,” tugging at the conscience of her
high-end consumer — and the sustainable bent, a hot trend
in fashion, has helped raise her profile. She was invited to
show her line at Prêt a Porter, the storied Paris trade
show, in a special section reserved for environmentally
responsible lines. After the show, she flew to New York where
she was feted as one of five socially conscious women business
owners to win a $10,000 grant from upscale women’s wear
maker Eileen Fisher.
“It was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve
had as a business owner,” says Cohen, who was inspired by
the mentoring she received from Eileen Fisher herself
— who advised her to stay true to her sustainability
vision — and from a company that she would like to
emulate.
Cohen grew up in Molalla and Portland and, while she always
had a knack for sewing and design, assumed she’d have a
career in health care. But on a visit to New York at 18, she
changed course after visiting the Fashion Institute of
Technology. “It’s like when you have a dream and
something triggers it during the day,” she explains,
recalling the pull of fashion design on her subconscious.
While a student at FIT, Cohen went to Italy to study at
Polimoda in Florence and ended up staying for two years,
working as a textile designer, attending European trade shows
and eventually landing a job at Patrizia Pepe, an Italian
fashion designer whose modern urban aesthetic Cohen felt
matched her own. Getting the job was a coup, but she was faced
with a choice: return to the States and finish her degree or
stay with Patrizia.
She chose FIT and, inspired by her desire to bring a healing
touch to fashion, did her first line of sustainably constructed
clothing as her senior project. In 2004 she came home to
Portland and, after a short stint at Adidas designing
women’s performance apparel, she began work on her
eponymous line.
Cohen took her first collection to New York in October 2005
and sold it to an exclusive boutique. All told, she had $10,000
in sales for the first season. It’s been doubling each
season since then.
The press, as Cohen puts it, “has been kind.”
She’s been mentioned in Nylon, Lucky and Town & Country. In August, the
cover of exclusive fashion trade publication Women’s Wear Daily featured
a model wearing a cream colored cocktail dress made of bamboo
fibers from Cohen’s spring line.
There’s nothing amateurish about her designs.
Cohen’s look is street-savvy and well constructed: hemp
silk pants paired with an organic cotton denim jacket for fall
and a soy pencil skirt with a bamboo halter-top for spring.
Cohen is confident enough in the quality of her designs that
she turned down a showroom in Los Angeles that was interested
in carrying her line because she didn’t feel confident in
the relationship. “It was ballsy to do it, but I’m
not going to settle,” Cohen says. “I’ll find
the right thing.”
WHETHER FOR SHOWROOMS OR SEWING TALENT, trips to L.A. are a
necessary evil for many Portland designers.
Despite its creative vibe and abundance of design talent,
Portland still lacks the production infrastructure of a mature
fashion city.
“There is good inspiration for a new aesthetic
here,” says Janet Jay, who worked with Diane Von
Furstenberg in New York in the ’80s and now runs a
creative company called Studio J in Portland. “But
it’s going to take some time.”
Portland has tripped a few times in its attempts to get
runway-ready. The PDX Fashion Incubator, a nonprofit set up to
help young designers, folded in 2005 after three years on the
scene. A group under the name PFW Productions continued the
incubator’s tradition of putting on Portland Fashion Week
(they’re busy planning the fifth annual show, which will
focus on sustainability), but last year they competed with
another fashion week put on by a group of designers called The
Collections with some silly debates as to which was the
official event.
Even Cohen says the city has a ways to go before becoming
known for its fashion. “There’s been a lack of
quality,” she says. “The whole thing has to shift
up a notch.”
So can Portland really compete with the likes of L.A. and New
York as a launching pad for a fashion line?
Portlanders Nathaniel Crissman and Rachel Turk are asking
themselves the same question. Known by their label, Church
& State, the duo is often mentioned as one of
Portland’s hottest. Their ethereal designs include
ruffle-edged dresses and bubble skirts in creamy hues. Last
spring they won an honorable mention (and some type in Women’s Wear Daily)
from Gen Art, which showcases up-and-coming designers.
Crissman and Turk, both 26, are committed to their line, but
not necessarily to Portland. “We really like it here, but
we want to have our cake and eat it too,” says Turk.
“Things happen so much faster in New York. Maybe
we’ll go to New York for a while and then come
back.”
The community of established clothing companies in Oregon
trends toward the sporty and casual, including Nike, Adidas,
Pendleton, Columbia Sportswear, Hanna Andersson, Jantzen, Lucy
and others. Even newcomer Nau, which is getting attention for
both its sustainability mission and its edgy design, follows
the outerwear tradition. These companies have their looks, and
many set trends, but high fashion they aren’t.
But they do hire young designers — and serve as a
training ground for those who harbor couture dreams.
“Corporate is not for everybody, but it pays the student
loan bills,” says Susan Bonde, director for apparel and
apparel accessory design at the Art Institute. “Portland
is big on apparel, not fashion.”
 Alice Dobson of Sofada showed her fall line during New York’s Fashion Week last year. Photo by Stuart Mullenberg |
Alice Dobson is actually OK with that. She prefers the title
apparel manufacturer to fashion designer, even though she last
year showed her wares in a runway show during New York’s
Fashion Week.
Dobson, who grew up in Gearhart and sewed clothes for herself
to make up for the lack of shopping options, attended the
Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles.
She was prompted to start her own line when, upon returning to
Portland just after 9/11, she couldn’t get a job with any
of the local clothing companies.
“I’d heard about Seaplane so I decided to just
start sewing again,” Dobson says. “The clothes
started selling really well.”
Encouraged, she took out a lease on a tiny storefront on
Northeast Fremont Street, named it after her clothing line,
Sofada (it’s a variation on the Portuguese word for
“naughty”) and opened for business. “I took
out a really bad loan to do it, but I paid it off in seven
months,” Dobson says.
“I want to make money, that’s why I design
clothing that’s wearable,” says the 29-year-old.
“I get ripped on sometimes as if that’s a bad
thing. But I love creating a business. I love giving a job to
local sewers.”
Last winter, Dobson, six months pregnant, and her husband
scraped together $30,000 to take advantage of a connection and
get Sofada’s fall ’07 line shown at an off-Fashion
Week tent in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. “I
was kind of getting bored,” she says. “I wanted to
get out of Oregon and Washington.”
The show paid off: Dobson was summoned for a private
audience with editors at Vogue while she was in New York
and when she got back the orders from boutique buyers came in
— right about when the baby arrived in June. She’s
been playing catch-up since then and hopes to return to New
York’s Fashion Week with her spring line in October.
Right now she’s working to keep the 20 stores that sell
Sofada happy and plans to do $100,000 in wholesale business
this year.
SOFADA IS FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS of another line of
wearable, pretty women’s clothing from the Portland area,
Michelle DeCourcy.
DeCourcy started her company at her kitchen table in 2000 and
now has six employees, a store in the Pearl District and a
wholesale business that brought in $500,000 last year.
She’s looking at growing her retail operation in markets
including Seattle, Santa Barbara and Arizona.
“I can see Portland becoming a large center for
fashion,” DeCourcy says. “We’re so set up to
have a garment industry.”
 Amy Christensen (left) designs the street-savvy looks for Sameunderneath, which was started by her husband Ryan (right). Photo by Stuart Mullenberg. |
The founder of Sameunderneath, Ryan Christensen, plans to be a
part of that industry. His company’s streetwise designs
aren’t high fashion, but they aren’t part of the
Gortex set either. Call it clothing on a mission.
While studying education at Portland State University, the
native Californian developed a curriculum that would teach kids
about tolerance of people who look different on the
outside.
Then he had a better idea. “Kids are very keen about
judging each other by the brands they wear,” says
Christensen, 30. So he built what he calls a lifestyle brand
that’s all about being open minded.
Sameunderneath’s flagship store, design studio and
headquarters are nestled at the intersection of North Shaver
and North Mississippi Avenue. The space is cozy and the store
dachshund, Bonnie, waddles lazily about to a reggae beat.
It may look calm, but the company is simmering.
Christensen’s wife and the line’s head designer,
Amy Christensen, is at the computer in the back room, catching
up after several days on the road to a trade show in Las Vegas
where Sameunderneath’s streetwear line was shown in a
juried selection of emerging designers alongside the likes of
Diesel, DKNY, Theory and other brands.
Christensen says they brought home twice as many orders as
they did from their last trade show. Thanks in part to a new
team of sales reps covering the entire country, Australia, New
Zealand and parts of eastern Asia, Sameunderneath is on track
to pull in $1 million in sales this year. Not bad for a
business that through 2004 was just peddling novelty T-shirts
at events, never making more than $5,000 in a year.
In 2005, Christensen raised $125,000 from friends and family
and launched cut-and-sew production (both in-house and
overseas) on unique Sameunderneath designs. Along the way, the
company adopted the use of all sustainable fabrics. Sales hit
$55,000 in ’05 and $345,000 in ’06. The brand
became a media favorite, getting coverage in publications
including GQ and Women’s Wear Daily and
ending up in the wardrobe of a few celebrities, including
singer Nelly Furtado.
With a tricked out website, an on-call street marketing
brigade, a MySpace page, and regular YouTube videos,
Sameunderneath is definitely homed in on a younger crowd,
though the prices of the jackets ($300), T’s ($52) and
pants ($132) require an income of some means.
But Christensen is unabashed in his mission to save the world
and he’s convinced that Portland is the best place to do
it from.
“I don’t think I could have started this in any
other city, to be honest,” Christensen says. “Here
I’m able to produce something real. In New York or L.A.
it would just become a sales gimmick.”
Whether it’s an authenticity that appeals to street
fashion connoisseurs or the green reputation that gives
environmentally friendly designs an extra dose of credibility,
Portland’s profile is on the rise internationally. If
this generation of designers can take advantage of that and
sell their looks to the world, there’s a new industry in
town.
Have an opinion?
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