Photo Credit: Kimberly Morand
Tell us a little about Andrea Loest. I grew up on a farm close to Winterset, Iowa. I’ve sewed since I was six years old and could spend time playing with materials and making clothing for myself and my stuffed animals. I studied Painting and Drawing at the University of Iowa, where I began my first collection of conceptual costumes that were used in my performance art practice. In 2010, I received my masters degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fiber and Material Studies. In Chicago, I expanded my art practice towards creating garment fragment systems that were used to create experiential retail installations.
Why start your line in New Orleans? I moved here in 2002, right after finishing my undergraduate degree. I was supposed to move to Chicago, but when I visited New Orleans I made friends right away and the people who saw my clothing loved it and understood it on all these different levels. It was so inspiring to me that I decided that I needed to live here. I had a line called Persona that I produced in New Orleans from 2003 to 2006, which taught me a lot about fashion and business. I decided to move back in 2010 after finishing my masters because it was important for me to live where I felt the freedom and support to do what I wanted as I moved forward in my art and fashion process. I love it here so much, the city and the people really inspire me. I’ve always appreciated how New Orleans is its own world that is separate from a lot of the perspectives and structures that other cities have.
Where do you draw your inspiration in designing? Most of my inspiration comes from communication. I’m such a talker that I look for ways to speak without vocalizing. I’m interested in the more subtle language of signs, the semiotics of materials, construction, style, and structures that are around us all of the time. Color is a language, texture is also a language in the way that a raw hem means something totally different from a finished hem. I really love how certain cuff on a men’s Oxford symbolize a totally different intention than another kind of cuff. I also look at architecture, environments, and landscapes to understand the ways we design our lifestyle with the intention to express who we are and how we want to live. I try to put those elements into my collections.
Love the shapes and colors you use in your dresses what brings you to creating those designs? My use of color and shape comes from my background as a painter. The shapes I use are from growing up on a farm and looking at rolling hills and flat fields. Now living in New Orleans, I have the wild gardens and swampy textures and decaying architecture to pull inspiration from too. I absolutely love color, and when I used to paint people, I’d see all these colors in their skin. Color is energy, I see it as a frequency that we use to set our intentions for the day and to create a line of communication between you and another person. It’s so personal too. For me, green is a color of magic and harmony and I wear it when I really want to make something happen that day. Instead of red, I wear magenta for situations that are more intense and emotional. Blue calms me down, but for many people its the color of work. I like playing with these dichotomies and really taking risks with color. I do love black, white, and gray when I need to tune out or set boundaries, but often fashion is filled with these colors because its taken from an urban landscape that needs boundaries. I think I prefer to pull colors and shapes from swamps and prairies where you can’t see the physical limitations.
What is Andrea Loest fashion all about and what to expect at fashion week? I want my clothes to be works of art for the people who collect and wear them. I am all about the experience of the garment, not just its utility, and the ways that it makes us think about how it expresses core aspects of our unique identity. This collection is inspired by ideas of customization, fragmentation, and modularity. These garments have the capacity to be really clean and simple or really innovative and wild. For Fashion Week, I am creating an installation of my project Fair Fit. It is a system of clothing fragments that allows clients to create customized garments. I have worked with pattern drafting systems for about a couple of years now, exploring ways of creating dresses that are customized in fit, color, shape and texture. At Martine Chiasson Gallery, there will be an installation of the garment fragments, at various stages of construction and completion, as well as models wearing the finished work. It will be interactive and will give the audience a chance to think about how they would interpret the collection. What kind of dresses would they make and why they would choose to put it together in their own special ways? Those are questions that I care a lot about and continue to inspire me in my design practice.
