Audrey Louise Reynolds - A Dyed and True Imprint
IT is rare for fabric makers to get much buzz, let alone credit in fashion bibles like Vogue and Lucky magazines. But Audrey Louise Reynolds, a 27-year-old self-taught designer who lives in Brooklyn, has emerged as the fashion world’s artisanal fabric dyer.
Her earthy, one-of-a-kind dyes, which she makes in small batches in her backyard in Red Hook, Brooklyn, using only natural and organic ingredients like bark and squid ink, have earned her a loyal following. Avant-garde designers like Rogan, Loomstate, No. 6, Bodkin and Wendy Nichol commission her to create unique colors and patterns.
For Rogan, Ms. Reynolds suffused a floor-length silk dress using five types of gray dye, including one made from recycled rubber tires that she dip-dyed, splattered and over-dyed to create deep waves of color.
For Wendy Nichol, she soaked the designer’s leather tote bags, creating a light wash that wrinkled the leather. She accentuated the look with hand-painted accents and used pigments made from berries, Carolina red clay and recycled rubber.
In the fall, she was tapped by the Brooklyn-based designer Kaelen Farncombe to dye a series of flouncy silk dresses that were meant to evoke the stormy grays of tornadoes.
“It’s very collaborative,” Ms. Reynolds said, in describing her approach. “It could be as simple as someone saying they prefer a single ingredient, like weeping-willow bark. Or it could be as elaborate as a whole story line that they want to evoke.”
Her most attention-getting commission to date was not for a dressmaker but for a jewelry designer. For New York Fashion Week last fall, Ms. Reynolds was asked by Pamela Love, a gothic jewelry designer, to help create a series of black dresses that would make it look as if the models were “being consumed by fire,” she said.
Ms. Reynolds achieved the swirl of purples, grays and burnt orange by hand-pressing dyes directly into the silk, soaking them in dyes made from rust and creating chemical reactions with powdered minerals. She also used wood-burning tools to melt and burn pieces of the fabric and even buried them in dirt to make them look aged and distressed.
“She created more than flat color,” Ms. Love said. “She created texture and patterns that can never be recreated.”
Fashion blogs took notice. “Just as compelling as the baubles were the dresses,” Style.com wrote.
Fashion came early and naturally to Ms. Reynolds, even though she was born far from the fashion capitals, in Detroit, and was raised in Charlotte, N.C., the daughter of an auto industry consultant. Like Molly Ringwald’s character in “Pretty in Pink,” she spent much of her youth making her own clothes, collage-style, from vintage pieces.
“I found things from the ’80s and married them with what people wore in the ’90s,” she said. “I bleached and stained my jeans. I added contrast stitching or embellishments, like leather-covered back pockets. They were always a little over the top.”
She started experimenting with dyes and paints in high school, and customized clothing, skate decks and shoes for friends. “I wasn’t really aware of high fashion then,” she said. “I created things to capture a certain attitude, like steam punk or old timey sailor.”
Ms. Reynolds attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where she studied painting and video. But she liked fashion more than film and she moved to New York in 2004 to pursue her craft.
Today, her business averages 100 to 200 pieces a month, which she completes on her own. Current jobs include a collaboration with Dieppa Restrepo, a shoemaker, and working with private clients who pick her to dye items from their closets. Meanwhile, she is branching out into costume design for movies and, for the home, textiles and hand-dyed wallpapers.
“I am lucky to have found success doing this because my work is a reflection of my life and of my curiosity,” Ms. Reynolds said. “As I grow I’ll do something totally different. The dyes will likely be a part of it, but I’ll always move in new directions.”
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