Cultures, Costumes Woven Together in Wearable Art

B e nice to your clothes, admonish the 50 members of the Textiles and Costume Guild of the Fullerton Museum Center. And if you don’t know how, the guild will teach you. Members offer classes on how to care for vintage clothing and international and folk textiles.

They also organize exhibits at the museum, such as the one on “Textiles of Vanishing Cultures” opening in March. Previous exhibits on wedding gowns and quilts displayed items culled from the museum’s collection of 19th- and 20th-Century clothing and textiles.

Although the guild takes pride in preserving the past, it also looks to the future. Each year, members organize a fashion show that introduces modern garment artists and their “wearable art.” This year’s “Walking Canvas” fashion show and tea will be at the Brea Civic Center Community Room on Saturday. Tickets for the fund-raiser are $25 and can be reserved by calling Nancy Timmons (714) 432-5645 or Cheryl Richard (714) 779-5334.

Richard, who was in charge of finding the artists for the event, has been involved in the guild for 12 years. She was at a meeting of the Embroidery Guild of America when members of the Textiles and Costume Guild spoke to the group, bringing along their “museum in a trunk,” which contained some of their collection. She joined soon afterward.

Here, Richard explains wearable art.

This is another in a series of first-person columns that allows people connected to the fashion industry to talk about their encounters.

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Wearable art is any handmade or embellished clothing. It came about by people who love costumes and love art and consolidated the two to make garments that were walking canvases, thus the name of our show.

It’s not a new concept; as you look back at costuming around the world, the ethnic costuming says something about the people it represents and their past. This is why our theme for the show is “Equal Under the Sun.” What we wear says something about all of us.

The artists in the show paint on silk or other fabrics and create needlework, leather work or beadwork. They use applique, and they do hand-weaving and quilting. They work with other forms of fabric manipulation, and they make jewelry.

These artists show that along with the creative aspect, there is also a strong technical aspect to making these pieces.

There is a hand-painted silk butterfly cape that’s gorgeous. It was made by Judy Barnes Baker, who, like several other artists, is a member of the Wearable Art Group of Southern California. There are so many beautiful pieces, I don’t want to single any out any one. There are artists who work with ethnic fabrics, a couple of weavers, and several who do surface embellishment. A couple of milliners will have some hats to show. They had to study millinery through museum works to try to bring back those skills.

All of this craftsmanship is a dying art. Every culture adapts to immediate needs and loses ones it no longer needs. It’s now so easy to buy clothes that everyone is getting away from sewing.

The problem is everyone looks alike. I’m teaching my 10-year-old daughter how to sew because I want her to be an individual and to have skills. I never have to take a pair of pants to the dry cleaners to have them hemmed.

I stitch and quilt, and I’ve sewn since I was a little girl. I grew up making my clothes, having been taught by my mother and grandmother. It’s creative. A lot of us have a love of art, but we can’t paint, so we can express ourselves through our wearable art.