J. Marie Textiles
By Stefene Russell
Photography by Frank Di Piazza
Marie McInerney has made stained aprons for Chinese pig farmers and folk dresses covered in overblown roses for a little girl lost in the woods. And this spring, she’ll be making a dozen punk kimonos. It’s all in a day’s work—at least in the spring—for Ms. McInerney, who’s part of the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis costume department. A graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute, she dyes on demand for any production, be it Nixon in China, Hansel & Gretel or The Mikado, which opens this May.
“Twelve of the chorus girls have these big kimonos,” she says, “and they want a Japanese skyline on them, so I’ll be painting all the kimonos so when they stand together, it’s like a cityscape.” Ms. McInerney, who also dyes fabrics for the Repertory Theatre, looks forward to spending spring in the dye shop: “As soon as I’m back there, it’s like I get to revamp my skills,” she says. “It’s all my own little shop, so anything that has to be dyed a certain color, aged, distressed, patinaed or look like it’s old or bloody … that’s pretty much all me.”
When the theatrical work winds down, she freelances as a knitter for Skif International, the designer sweater company that made the post-apocalyptic sweaters for The Matrix. She also makes her own line of dyed, sewn, distressed, reworked and silk-screened textile pieces, which she sells under the name J. Marie.
Down in her basement studio, she opens the door to her “stash,” a metal locker that’s filled with bolts of white silk. All of her pieces, whether cushions for rehabbed Danish modern furniture, table runners or purses, begin with this white fabric that she dyes to get just the right slate blue, dusty green or silvery gray.
“There’s organza, there’s chiffon—there’re all different kinds of silks,” she says, laying out a green multilayered scarf as an example. “I choose fabrics based on their weight and sheen and how opaque or sheer they are. All of these fabrics are dyed in the same bath, but because of the difference of the fabric, you get a different color.”
Aside from color and chemistry, Ms. McInerney says she is influenced by earlier design styles, including Victorian, Art Deco and Art Nouveau, with a little punk thrown into the mix. Recently, she covered a 9-foot-long window seat with dyed cotton velveteen for a client’s Art Nouveau house off Russell.
“I really, really like old Victorian rugs and tapestries,” she says. “But it’s not that I want to make things covered in curlicues; it’s more that everything back then was so refined, so well made.”
Her own pieces, made only with natural fibers and painstakingly dyed and sewn, are an anomaly in today’s wash-and-wear world. When she is finally able to install the industrial dye vat she purchased a year ago in her new basement (she and her husband had to rent a truck with a lift to pick it up at the airport), it will be used for custom-dyed furniture fabrics or batches of hand-spun wool—rather than mass-produced designs.
“I can’t just plan something,” Ms. McInerney says. “I don’t think most artists can. I have to take out my fabric—play with it, look at it, look at old buttons, fabrics, different things … and get inspired.”
For more information, go to jmarietextiles.com.
