Seeing verse in Threads:

An Interview with SuKaz

Threads of my life—warp, weft in Your loom

Cloth slate, pliant folds you embrace

Each filament dream spun — faith, love and tears

Forged, gossamer steel, by Your grace

—”Threads,” a poem by Susan Hollingsworth about The Threads Collection inspired by the memory of her sister Linda

We’re excited about how closely your brand aligns with The Napkin Poetry Review’s vision to bring creation stories to life. Could you tell us more about how you came to base your brand on this practice? Have there been any stories that stood out throughout your travels, later to be translated into your clothing?

Initially, I had an exhibit planned in collaboration with an artist who creates beautiful large-scale oil paintings. To assimilate the two diverse art forms, I felt there should be a narrative pointing to the connection and wrote a multiverse poem describing how I imagined related scenes and characters coalescing. When I explained my approach to the artist she was drawn to the concept and suggested we base the exhibit on the narrative verse. I recreated the full scale exhibit of jackets on mannequins in miniature using 12” posable wooden dolls and stitching each costume, 32 in all - jackets, leggings and tiny tops. The overall design of the jackets has been greatly influenced by my travels, as my husband’s career led us to live and work in multiple international locations for 20 years. The time we spent working and traveling in the Middle East left me with a lasting impression of the beauty concealed and hidden beneath head and face coverings and voluminous robes, an element I incorporated into my designs. It also speaks to the aspects of privacy in my nature, of holding back and maintaining distance. The earlier jacket were styled to completely conceal the fiber art panels in closed pleats, the hidden beauty only revealed through movement of the body and fabric.

Kaveh Akbar said, “Why not allow my poems to meet many me’s...,” and we feel as though your collagist designs speak to this understanding of the self. What is your process for creating clothes that speak to a more comprehensive, cross-cultural human spirit?

The jackets are absolutely a cross-cultural mix, from the fabrics to the panels and buttons. Each element arises from a different mindset of cultural values and traditions, yet the parts come together as a thing of beauty; each jacket is created through love and passion for the mediums it joins, honoring the cultures which inspired it.

How do you understand the intersection between language and design?

It is interesting that language has played a part in the creation of the jackets. In some ways, I recognize language as a vehicle of collaboration which is the heart and soul of every design. When we moved to Kazakhstan, I didn’t speak any other languages than English which made it difficult to communicate verbally with people in my daily life. My embroiderer, Yulduz, a young mother of two children, stitched the first art panels using the technique of free form machine embroidery, recreating drawings by literally painting in thread as she looked at the picture and guided the fabric beneath the machine needle. I have never been able to draw even a straight line, and when we first began our collaboration I had no clear way to convey what was in my head. I spent hours trying to make her understand my vision and, over time, we bonded and developed an understanding that transcended our differences. I am inspired by the creativity of others, and so collaboration is essential to every piece that we make. Without the love and passion each artist brings to his or her craft, and the teamwork in bringing all the elements together, there would be no jackets. In relation to fashion, my focus has never been on fashion itself. Instead, I looked to other inspiration including music which I consider a kind of verse even when it doesn’t have lyrics. I was in the middle of the Threads project when my sister died, a very difficult time for me. The concept behind Threads was based on a Maypole dance we performed as children where each dancer holds a brightly colored ribbon radiating from a central pole and moves in rhythm with all the other dancers. The finale is a riot of activity when the participants move in opposition to one another weaving in and out so that their ribbons form a tightly patterned elaborate braid enveloping the pole. The braid represented structure out of chaos, reason out of the unreasonable. Writing “Threads” clarified for me my belief that there is a purpose behind the incomprehensible and comforted me in a very emotional time in my life.

Could you elaborate further on your connection to poetry and writing? What does poetry mean to you compared to other mediums?

I have always been able to communicate through writing, receiving the NCTE award in high school for a prose piece. But for me, prose writing can be like pulling teeth; scratch out, scratch out...Verse, on the other hand, flows smoothly in my head, and when I nail the rhythm and rhyme in communion with the feeling behind the words, it gives me chills. There’s something mystical in the process of poetry.

At the Napkin Poetry Review, we emphasize how poetry can become both a mental tool—a frame for thoughts and references—as well as a storytelling medium. How do poetry and language inspire your creative processes? Were there instances in which literary allusions or your own poems have inspired your designs?

You’re right, poetry is just that—a frame for the design and an ongoing litany through the process. And the process is messy: heaps of fabric and panels on my studio floor. There’s no set order, either—sometimes the panel comes to life first, sometimes I choose the fabric, finally adding the button if there is one, but ultimately all the pieces have to speak to one another. As to using literary allusions or poems as inspiration, in general the design comes first. But the verse is the culmination of the whole process, growing in the background of each step and bringing them together at the end.

We love the beautifully crafted and meticulously designed Threads collection, and we congratulate you on this success! May we ask what’s next for SuKaz and whether there might be plans to incorporate more poetry in the future?

I’m working now on a second Points of Light, a virtual runway show, and I’m already guided by a verse I’ve written for that collection. For the collection, we’re collaborating with an artist and it’s been a real back and forth to get the vision together. But as of now, we have a series of drawings ready to be transferred into velvets—beautiful velvet fabrics—to form the jackets. Another project, Visions of Light (tentatively) will deal with the tricks of light in nature and the effect this phenomena on our perceptions. I would love to find a way to incorporate poetry and language into this project once again as writing was such a wonderful culmination of the Threads collection.