POP OF COLOUR: A 'natty little outfit' Holmes made in the late 80s for the Mohair Awards.
Shoes are for walking. Hats protect skin from the sun. Jackets keep us warm.
Unless you are Susan Holmes, the fabric artist who “WOW”ed the U3A audience this month with her wearable art.
The Herald caught up with the fabric artist at her Gaddums Hill home to talk shop, and hear about the techniques she uses to create wearable art. Because Holmes is not your regular seamstress.
She is one of the most awarded World of Wearable Art designers in New Zealand, not to mention seemingly the most energetic octogenarian speaker U3A has had.
At the U3A talk, Holmes stepped off the stage, grabbed her Parachute Bride dress and took off around the room. The garment came to life as it filled with air.
The name Parachute Bride came from the silk the dress was made from. It was made in 1939 as a parachute for World War 2. A modern design, the idea of a dress made from a parachute is far from new.
Whether they were savvy, frugal or just tight, some soldiers would jump out of planes in the middle of war and gather their silk parachutes to take home for their sweethearts, so the valuable material could become a wedding dress.
Before fashion, awards and notoriety, Holmes was a teacher. Then a potato changed her life.
“I went out to the kitchen, got a vege knife and a potato and cut it in half,” recalls Holmes in the book, Susan Holmes: Fabric Artist, written by Cerys Dallaway-Davidson.
Holmes carved in a design, saturated a sponge ink and “plonked it on a scarf, and I achieved a scarf with little birds on it”, she says in the book.
Over a hot drink at her house, Holmes says she is self-taught, with the help of others.
“I was desperately excited and six weeks later I was supporting myself making block print things.”
But the potatoes had a major flaw: Decomposition. So Holmes moved on to using sturdier materials for block prints, which still live in her garage today.
Her bedrooms, walls, attic, shed and basement are a veritable gallery stuffed with items from her years behind the needle. She has the same workbench she started with in the 1970s.
Stencilling became another signature technique for Holmes, with birds, flowers and feathers repeating over her dresses. Before she found modern materials made for cutting stencils, she used sheets of plastic meant for an X-ray machine.
She used these cutouts with creative flare, employing a vacuum cleaner to blow ink on to the stencils to produce a splatter of colour.
Throughout her designs, colour pops, but when she started she could not buy what she wanted.
“I soon realised that the materials didn't come in the colours I wanted so I learned to dye.”
Necessity wrought creativity and she dyed everything from natural to synthetic fibres, using western techniques as well as Japanese shibori, which uses the same principles as tie-dye but in a “very classy” way.
As a designer, Holmes is passionate about working with silk and is on the record saying she hates working with cotton.
Wool and silk take colour easily, but Holmes says dying cotton is tedious, requiring multiple alkaline dyes.
“Things have changed these days. People don't dye their own clothes because they don't have to,” Holmes says.
But some of her most eye-catching garments are those she crinkles, giving the fabric structure and shape.
This technique allowed her to explore three-dimensional fabric art and made Holmes into something of a sculptor, wrote Dallaway-Davidson in her book.
For over a decade Holmes was a traditional fashion designer, but then came her WOW era when she entered World of Wearable Art every year from 1991 until 2016.
At the 2002 event, then Prime Minister Helen Clark wore Holmes' design Crest of a Wave down the catwalk.
Now in her 80s, Holmes no longer submits work but she still has an eye on the competition.
“The thing about WOW is they are the best of the best at making a show. People have tried it all over the world . . . They're never as good.”