Brook

Lookbooks

Just updated and added: all our lookbooks, now in one place. Over time, I’ve played with so many variations on content-division between the ecommerce site and cms pages, such as a blog. I think I’ve finally found the right one (let’s hope!) Thus lookbooks, fit guides, and blog-type stuff now resides here, at brookthere.blog. Ecommerce…

Minute by Minute, Easy by Easy

This is Gracie. She is a six month old Belgian Malinois, and now, she is often my studio partner. I’ve never had a puppy before, and generally, starting with a high drive breed is not recommended. Thus, this has been an interesting past few weeks of adjustments! In reflecting on why I would have willingly taken…

The reality of being a maker

There is this thing that happens when you have a creative personality and then start a business. The reality is that actual artistic process and business processes, at least for me, come from different parts of the psyche. Or the soul, who knows. So let’s imagine you like making clothes: it’s an intensely creative and…

Notions

Notions refers to the tiny bits of things that get attached to clothing in the construction process. It’s a catch-all term that includes: buttons, zippers, elastics, labels, bindings, closures, and thread. One of the challenges of made-in-the-usa is that almost all notions are now made overseas. For years, customers have been asking for bras with…

Three Lists

When I arrived in the studio yesterday, I made three lists. Things I should do. Things I want to do. Things I’m afraid to do. I constrained the parameters to just studio work, by the way. Otherwise those could be very long lists. This was after a few days spent diligently and timefully completing year…

Persona Workings

In college I was introduced to idea of persona work by a very interesting performance art teacher. Performance art is an entirely different thing from performing arts. The latter includes ballet, theater, dance, acting, etc. The former term encompasses any time-based, 4th dimensional art project. One of my early performance pieces was about fresh starts,…

Gesamtkunstwerk

Lately I’ve been making turtlenecks. Ah, the oft-mocked garment of the 1980s. But it’s so practical, so utilitarian, so comfortable under a wool sweater! The turtlenecks I’ve been making have extra long sleeves (always) and some random darts in the back, to add shape. They are from a lightweight fabric, the same one we use…

Summer Preparations

Living in the northeast one feels the change of seasons strongly and suddenly. The weather seems to veer from cold and damp to sunny and glorious with little warning. There are two weeks of terrible black flies, followed by a few weeks of tolerable mosquitoes, and then it is really here: Summer. About a year…