Hadley Clark
Clothing Artist
Sewing for Hadley Clark is an act of empathy, an act of discovery, and all about telling a story. Hadley identifies as an artist, not a fashion designer, and has spent the last 20 years refining her artistic voice, increasing her technical skills, launching a clothing business, and educating others. She is a self-described “architect of cloth for the human form,” who views sewing, and the associated clothing industry, with a gravity absent from the mass fashion culture at large. Her ethical awareness, business sense, and environmental conscience have led her down an artistic path of extreme frugality and innovation; using dead stock, salvaged materials, and other remnants as the foundation of her work. Her slogan is “Perennial Clothes for All” and her heirloom garments are as naturally conceived as the fruit from a backyard garden. Her work is timeless, her platform as relevant now as it was twenty years ago, yet continues to evolve as she stitches her story together, piece by piece.
Hadley uses her studio walls as vertical work space for collaging fabric scraps into yardage for her bespoke clothing.
It began with a natural interest in the sewing machine; Hadley’s mother made all of her clothes growing up, and her mother’s sewing was integral to the fabric of the home. With the whir of the sewing machine as familiar as her thoughts, textiles and patterns decorating the dining table, it was only a matter of time before she hauled the machine down to the basement and began to experiment herself. “Since high school, I would go to thrift stores—I worked at thrift stores—and would take my clothes apart and then put them back together, which now, when I think about it, is what I do for my creative identity,” she recalls. “I would get bags of lingerie and old clothes from thrift stores and screen-print on them. Or print on washcloths and make quilts.” From the onset she wasn’t interested in replicating what she saw in stores and catalogues; she wanted to find meaning in what she was doing and create something unique. “I had no idea what I was doing, I was just using my intuition.”
Hadley uses her intuition as a compass in life and in finding her creative voice. As a teenager in the 1990s, before Pinterest, Instagram, Etsy and the internet, Hadley found inspiration in real life and in young girl magazines of the time—Sassy, YM, and Jane to name a few—but mostly she just created things that she wanted to make from what she had easy access to, not in imitation or to self-promote on social media. “What a gift to not even have that opportunity, or ability to do that, so you were just making for your own need, not to get outside, monetary approval, or likes on Instagram…I’m so grateful I didn’t grow up with all of that stuff as a young girl,” she declares. Even though she didn’t overtly seek validation from others, once she introduced her work to the world, received affirmation, and was embraced by the local fashion community, she launched her career and took her art to the next level.
Freeman Heart Smock Crop Shirt made of silk collage yardage and features a pleated back for a generous silhouette. The raw edged seams are signature to her collage system. Available in her online shop.
Her first public exhibition was in 2001, following 9/11, as a participant in the second annual West 18th Street Fashion Show, which at the time was called Isabel’s Fashion Spectacle. In its infancy, the fashion show was a sort of “renegade fashion takeover in the street” started by the mother-daughter duo Deborah Borel and Clare Hawk (now chef owners of Loud House Farm in South Kansas City), then owners of Isabel’s—one of the first shops on west 18th street in the Crossroads that sold “totally wacky, artist made clothing." The first Fashion Spectacle “was so inspiring to me and Peregrine (Honig, artist and owner of Birdie’s) and a bunch of us young women.” After the first show, Hadley volunteered to join the effort. “I showed up at a meeting and told them I could make clothes—I did not know how to make clothes—so I had to figure it out…What I was making was not extraordinary, was not special to anyone except me, and my hands that made it…but I learned that you will continually be invited to do things if you show up, you are kind, and your ego about your work, or your ego about yourself, doesn’t override the group, or the community, that you are working in.”
A clothing rack catalogues a variety of her work and allows students and visitors the chance to study her techniques in constructing, manipulating, and adorning clothing.
In 2003, Deborah and Clare asked Hadley to take over their lease on the West 18th Street retail space, so Hadley obliged and with fellow KU grad, Cobi Newton, opened Spool, a concept store selling artist what-nots and Hadley’s custom clothing. After the first year Cobi left Spool and for the next several years, Hadley ran the shop solo. After a traumatic year including a bad break-up and a battle with cancer, Hadley sold her store, packed her bags, and moved to France for graduate school at the renowned Parsons Paris to study fashion design. Given her sewing experience, maturity, and work ethic, it is not surprising that she thrived. In graduate school, “I got to learn something new in a very intense, rigorous environment, but also creatively find myself, which I had never done.” But the long hours in studio and being in a foreign country where she did not speak the language was isolating. “It was a very lonely time but I got to create habits and systems and learn what I like and what I don’t like, not in response to a partner or a group of friends. For me, it wasn’t about moving to Paris and falling in love. It was kind of like learning to fall in love with myself and just be with myself.”
One of Hadley’s current projects is with Colorant, the New York based apparel and accessory line that utilizes natural dye plants to pigment their clothing. Hadley is deconstructing baby sweaters from a previous season and repurposing them into new, adult garments.
“The rigor of training was to be able to look and learn how to take research and inspiration and infuse it into fabric to create a story that goes on a body.” For a few years after graduating Hadley continued to release her work in collections, as fashion houses do, but realized that as an artist that process didn’t really work. Additionally she had grown weary of the fashion industry, or fast fashion in particular, and the over-consumption, production methods, cultural appropriation, and waste. Her aversion to waste inspired her to get excess materials or remnants from other textile artists rather than buy new material, and eventually the luxury atelier Asiatica started giving her antique, Japanese cottons from kimonos that were molded or stained that they couldn’t use, which was perfect for Hadley and her mission. “I’m more interested in textiles that have a history in them that I can see than just yardage on a bolt,” she says. But she doesn’t manipulate the fabric to cause distress or mold. “I want to discover it—and I want it to be authentic.”
A conceptual work Hadley made from repurposed 1970s taffeta drapes is at first glance a bomber jacket with a train. Upon closer inspection, the voids demonstrate the pattern pieces used in the garment and the space between the pattern pieces are the remnants that form the train.
Her process begins with collecting the fabric remnants, then “I’ll organize styles, color stories, and fabric kinds to keep in a bin together.” After aggregating the fabric scraps, she will collage them together to build yardage. Then, she cuts the pattern. “I like the surprise and lack of control—I think it feels fresher” than draping and planning where the various pieces will end up on the garment. “I don’t want to make the same dress out of the same fabric over and over. I want every piece, not just for the wearer but for me, to be a surprise.” The discovery and experimental aspect of her process is part of what makes her an artist and not a seamstress. Similarly, as an instructor, she would rather push her students to be creative than to focus on the technical aspects of garment making. While both are important, in this Youtube era of do-it-yourselfers, she has a point; anyone can watch a video on how to make a buttonhole, but it’s more challenging to find your own, unique, creative voice. Students need a breadth of techniques in their skillset in order to create well-made garments, but being able to innovate and improvise throughout the process is imperative to their creative success. “Supporting them (students) through the unknown, and not actually knowing how to get where they are going, is a better toolkit,” Hadley theorizes.
Hadley is currently faculty at the University of Kansas, her undergrad alma mater, as well as at the Kansas City Art Institute, and in 2017 she started her own community based sewing school, the Hadley Sewing School (HSS). At HSS she not only empowers students to mend, alter, and make their own clothes by teaching sewing fundamentals, she also brings a reverence to clothing, an understanding to the production and life cycle, and how our choices make a lasting impact beyond our own comfort and aesthetics. “150 years ago, we would wear our clothes until they started to be worn, turn them inside out or take them apart, resew them together, flip the fabric so the stains weren’t on the outside anymore, wear that out, and then all of that fabric would be made into a quilt.” The life cycle of the original garment was years or even decades before it became trash. Now, people are consuming more and more. And Hadley believes it is both the consumer and the companies creating fast fashion who need to make better decisions. “Once you buy that item from H&M, that is your responsibility…I always think about Jessica Simpson and all of her plastic shoes…or Kim Kardashian and all of her new Skims stuff. I think about all of that stuff just in a landfill…if there was some sort of accountability for their operation and where their merchandise ends up…I think that could change the production,” she lectures.
Devastating Silk Collage Shirt Dress with mesh sleeves, raw edged seams, and paired with custom mesh socks, available for purchase on her online shop.
“Fashion is such a bad word. I love and I hate it so much,” she confesses. Her passion has led her on a journey of self-discovery, finding her artistic voice, and creating a platform for teaching others and inspiring change. “Fashion is so interesting because it is always a reflection of where we are in the world. It is our visual history.” And while it may tell our history, today fashion is also the crux of clothing culture. Hadley’s motivation to sew, from those early years in her basement, were the seeds of her core values to conserve, salvage, and create, that continue to blossom as she works on changing the industry today, one student, one garment at a time.
