Rose and her blind rescue cat in her Branciforte sewing studio. Photo by Chip Scheuer.
Anyone who sees Arielle Rose downtown marks the sightings by what she’s wearing.
A cropped red jacket in a restaurant, a southwestern shawl while she’s chilling outside Metavinyl, a parade of ankle-length floral dresses that show the sunflower tattoos on her arms.
A local designer operating out of Locust Street’s Wallflower Boutique.html, Rose makes her own handmade looks out of recycled fabric, selling them under the label Teaspoon. She’s made a mix of whimsical clothing inspired by old European circuses and gypsies that scoff at standard sizing and mass production, fighting fashion industry training that says all the clothes you need are available for purchase at your nearest Urban Outfitters.
“I’ve been doing it for forever. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do. I have to be making stuff,” she explains in her studio on her mother’s wooded Branciforte property. “When I was a kid my mom bought me those bulk Barbie dresses, and when she came into my room 10 minutes later I had cut all of them up and put them together in completely different ways.”
Besides creating hipster Barbies, Rose took a sewing class once. She was 7. She swears it’s easy—all she does is find inspiring details from friends’ used clothes, rip them apart, refit them, sew them back up in beautiful ways and then dye them a different color.
A picture is beginning to emerge of this girl with the piercing at the corner of her left eye that shines like a dewdrop. Arielle Rose is a merry dark-haired butterfly princess traipsing the globe with the confidence of a girl with a calling. She works in a forest glen with birds chirping on her shoulders and pure mineral water bubbling up at her feet, while kittens curl around the legs of the unicorn tethered to her cottage.
Does she use patterns?
“Never.” Shapes it to herself? “I just throw stuff on it! “ She laughs like she’s discovering something. “I just—put it all together.”
She whips off her hooded sweater to show where it needed to be altered.
“It’s been dyed, and I attached the hood to it. The hood is actually a sleeve of a really big jacket. It was just the perfect size.” She takes off another sweater to show the blue floral and lace dress that she made. “Whenever I make things, I just use what’s around me. My mom made pottery by pressing lace into the clay, so I have bags and bags of lace from her because she doesn’t do that pottery anymore.
“It’s like a box. You just have to fit the pieces together.”
She has more energy than a hadron collider, playing musical instruments and reading aloud from journals in a room hung with handmade dream catchers, while her half-blind rescue cat curls on a chair.
“When I learned about the fashion industry I didn’t want anything to do with it,” she says. “The fashion industry is dirty. These skinny models in high heels, hurting themselves, poisoning themselves, and little kids working in factories making clothes for women trying to be pretty.
“I give all my friends dresses,” she protests when teased with participation in the hated capitalist system of exploitation. “It’s so important to me that they just be out there.”
The world probably opens for her because she adopts one-eyed kittens. It recently gifted her a used 20-seater bus so she can make a North American traveling circus with a greenhouse on top and maybe some blue Maltese tigers. She calls it “Das CirKus Waggon,” and it’s her future business plan.
“We’ll stay on farms, or in the woods, go to festivals and sell dresses. I think gifting is what will fund the trip, the ability to help somebody or give someone a piece of yourself that doesn’t have to be money,” Rose says.
She’s been setting the curve since grade school, and an industry that jacks up the price of clothes with the confidence that it’s cornered the market won’t fly for much longer if she has her way.
“You can totally make it yourself! You’ve been pushed down so much, all you got to do is say, ‘I don’t need to pay attention to anything you’re telling me, and I can go do it on my own.’” She laughs. “In fact, that’s why I didn’t go to college, either!”
Arielle Rose’s Teaspoon clothing is found at Wallflower Boutique, 103 Locust St., Santa Cruz. www.shopthewallflower.com/
