Designer and textile artist Katie Kantley takes the silk road
By Jeannette Batz Cooperman
Photograph by Frank Di Piazza
In London and Paris, Katie Kantley learned the traditional couture techniques for millinery and corsetry. When she studied fashion design and printmaking at Stephens College in Columbia, Mo., she learned to use color and shape in ways anything but traditional. By the time Kantley opened her studio in New Haven, Mo., she was determined to create clothes that were sensuous, fluid and easy to wear (“I like to go out, and I don’t like to be tugging on my shirt all night”) but finished with a 19th-century attention to detail—and so brilliantly colored, the patterns so delicate, it would be impossible to produce two of a kind.
She chose to work in silk charmeuse—silk because its triangular fibers refract light like a prism, breaking flat color into a shimmer of different tones; and charmeuse because it drapes so beautifully, falling close to the body and showing off colors. Instead of using a single solid dye, she dyed each length of fabric at least twice, sometimes three times, washing it in a series of colors.
Her first hit was the trapeze halter, which ties at the side of the neck and lightly outlines the body’s curves. She scavenged her costume collection, fashioning bits of elaborately worked vintage dress sleeves into sequined collars. The rest of the top she allowed to drape, loath to cut up fabrics she had spent so many hours dyeing and ruin the effect with a grid of seams.
Kantley also marbled silk, making gossamer scarves patterned like antique book papers. Then she moved into shibori dyeing, an ancient Japanese technique done on a pole (she uses a PVC pipe). “You have to wrap the fabric around the pole and tie threads every eighth of an inch, then scrunch it all to the bottom,” she explains. She sets the pleats, which do fall out eventually, with a steam iron; meanwhile, the formal gowns she makes can be worn three or so times. “After I scrunch the silk, I paint new dyes on and the threads act as a resist,” she says, “so you get a chevron design. Then I might rewrap it in the opposite direction for a cross design.”
Kantley is renovating her studio, a large-windowed 1890s building on the Missouri River, so she can do larger-scale marbling. She also makes shibori wall hangings, and she takes custom orders. Trapeze tops cost $95, a shibori ballgown considerably more.
Katie Kantley | 139 Front Street, New Haven, Mo. | 573-680-0785 | www.kantley.com
