Photo by Carmen Troesser
When Lydia Crespo moved out of her art studio in Chicago for the final time last year, she wondered whether she’d ever find another space like it.
Now, from Studio 10 in St. Charles’ Foundry Art Centre, the Argaman&Defiance owner rotates among mixing batches of dye she’ll use to color her popular sweatshirts and linens, running down the hall to pop more garments into the washer, and changing the load in the studio’s dryer. Every once in a while she’ll stop to chat with curious guests drawn into the space by her work.
“Oh! Indigo dye,” exclaims a passerby.
“I’m not teaching indigo dye classes right now,” responds Crespo, “but I am teaching onion skin dye.”
On a corner table spattered with drops of red, blue, black, and white ink, Crespo—whose goods are sold in more than 50 boutiques nationwide and who’s designed for Urban Outfitters, West Elm, and Target—begins to mix a batch of pink dye, carefully eyeing the glugs of red and white inks she’s pouring into a plastic container from Home Depot. Ball jars filled with onion skin and Osage orange—used to make natural dyes—line the shelves. Using a rubber spatula, she mixes her concoction; with the paddle end she scrapes down the container’s side, adding black ink to cool the hue. “What does this need?” she asks herself. Eventually, she achieves the perfect shade of blush.
To make the pattern for her textiles—smoky shibori-like swirls—Crespo will bunch the fabric before applying the ink, using the garment as resistance. “I wanted to do a grownup version of tie-dye, but I’m not actually tie-dyeing,” she says. “I like to show the hand. You’re seeing a brushstroke; you’re seeing the way the brush is pulling against the fabric.” It’s trial-and-error. Crespo scraps a piece at least four times before getting it right.
Photo by Carmen Troesser
What Crespo likes about working at the Foundry is that there are “14 other artists here, and they’re available to problem-solve with me.” That she found an art home in St. Charles isn’t surprising. She was a photography major at St. Louis Community College–Florissant Valley before turning to sculpture and studying at the Art Institute of Chicago.
“I don’t know how to describe it, other than my hands knew what to do,” says Crespo. “Understanding how the dyes were working—it made sense.”
But it wasn’t until Crespo worked at Ogilvie/Pertl in Chicago that she was inspired by her bosses, two women, to start her own business. “I got to ask them every question in the world,” she says. She used the funds from a fellowship to launch Argaman&Defiance.
That passing along of knowledge is something Crespo hopes to do for other makers. “With people coming here, or when I’m at a market or a pop-up, I get maybe five minutes with the customer to explain my process,” she says, “but when I’m running a workshop, I get to turn that into a two-hour conversation about design.”
