Abnormal Formal:

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Dressing for the Revolution

by HELEN CARTER

Utican Julie Snedeker is one of those designers. She’s the dynamo behind Patches Products (www.patchesproducts.com). A self-proclaimed hippie-mamma, she makes intricate well-crafted patchwork clothing, all generated from her home studio. You’re probably familiar with patchwork clothes, but when you see them made well, you know it. Her pieces are a breath-taking feat of design, construction and heart-warming colors. Julie has been sewing since she was a kid, and patchwork is the perfect medium for her. She is inspired by music and the outdoors - a skirt on her website features eight orange and one black goldfish, in keeping with a concept of feng-shui. She sews with hemp fabric, organic cotton, plus some vintage and recycled fabrics, and she likes to use every scrap. Some designs are pre-made but you can custom order clothes in fabrics and colors of your choosing. Her flock of regular customers are loyal - she knows their measurements and they know they’ll get beautiful clothes that fit every time.

You don’t have to roast in a dusty parking lot any more to get Patches Products clothing. She sells them online through her website, and also on ebay and Moondrop Clothiers (www.moondropclothiers.com). See them in person in shops like The Lot on Cape Cod.

Desira Pesta’s clothes move even more toward the eccentric. Her company is Veritas et Pulchra (Truth and Beauty). She’s a recent S.U. painting graduate who "didn’t really find painting to be that lucrative" but is finding other ways to put her art into the world. In her last years at college she became smitten with silk-screening, and quickly knew that she wanted to take it beyond static images on the front of t-shirts. She combines her more painterly silk-screening with a penchant for making aesthetically spare, avant-garde clothing. She considers her work to be covertly political, using recycled materials, reworking existing clothing, and using non-traditional images of women rather than "idealistic or romanticized images of life". She makes batches of clothes each month, and no two pieces are exactly the same. She describes it as "an ever-evolving menagerie of ideas, sculptural elements, textures and colors." Many of her designs give a nod to styles of the 60’s and 70’s. You can get Veritas et Pulchra clothing through her site www.desirapesta.com, locally at highlyAtomic Vintage in Syracuse, and at a large handful of shops, all listed on her website.

There is much more out there. Try Etsy. Etsy (www.etsy.com) has more than clothes - it’s an online marketplace for artists and crafters to sell all things hand made. Think of it as ebay, only friendly and filled with funky hand made goodness. Etsy is in its infancy, but it’s one large over-achieving infant. Slick and well-organized, you would never guess that it’s run by a handful of guys out of their Brooklyn apartment! You’ll find things like a handmade skirt with appliqued conjoined-twin bears, robot t-shirts, a black crocheted fishnet evening gown ... just go look!