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 Clothes calls The rise and fall and rise and fall and rise of fashion designer Lisa Kingsley
Lisa Kingsley knows something about manmade disasters.
Back in 1998, when the fashion designer resided in Los Angeles,
camisoles she stitched together out of sari fabric brought back from a
trip to Bali adorned the likes of Madonna and sold out at Fred Segal in
four days. Then the Indonesian economy collapsed, crushing her nascent
business just as it was taking off.
After the Evanston native collected her wits and moved back home to
Chicago, she rebuilt her business and launched a new line during Fashion
Week in New York in September of 2001. September 10, 2001, to be exact.
She'd made appointments to show her premiere Lisaki collection to
everyone in the fashion capital who dictates what's fashionable, from
buyers to editors to stylists. Then the Twin Towers collapsed, along
with the U.S. economy and the state of retail. And the designer had to
start again at the bottom. "I wanted to make something fun. People are ready for fun again,"
muses Kingsley. Dressed in a black Hanes tank top and white parachute
pants, the 33-year-old world traveler still has the perky appeal of a
California girl, with her sandy hair arranged in a ponytail, button nose
and exacting blue-gray eyes. Clicking around on her stylish pointy
camel-lambskin half-boots with stilettos, she shows off her two newest
lines at her Ravenswood studio, where she's set up shop the past nine
months with her assistants Manuela and Tatiana, along with three
seamstresses now busily making samples. (She sources out her production
work to a factory in Albany Park.) She fingers the lambskin, suede,
rayon and silk textiles she imports from "basically all four corners of
the Earth."
Spring/Summer 2004 will mark the fourth season of her high-end
Lisaki line, featuring shades of ivory, okra and black in the
collection, darling pieces like the Japanese cotton-blend peaked black
dress, the fringed ivory silk tennis skirt befitting a flapper, the
burnt-out rayon skirt. In 2004, she will also be launching her more
affordable Lisa Kingsley label of knit mix-and-matches in popsicle
shades, from an asymmetrical miniskirt cut longer in the back ("So you
can wear a miniskirt but you don't feel your ass is hanging out") to
colorful camisoles. "Lisaki is a commitment. Lisa Kingsley is, 'Hey,
it's cute, I'll get it in two colors'," she pitches. And with retail
prices of the Lisa Kingsley line ranging from $95 to $300, it's more
manageable for fashionistas on a budget, although the more upscale
Lisaki is still fairly reasonable, ranging from $150 to $700 for the
leather pieces.
Kingsley sent a shipment of samples of the new Lisa Kingsley line to
the actresses on "Sex in the City." "They're like in love with
them," she says. One can imagine Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie pairing
Kingsley's aqua and black halter top with the matching striped skirt
while teetering around Washington Square Park clutching a Starbucks,
deep in romantic thought.
And if the wardrobe designer for the TV trend bible decides to
incorporate one of Kingsley's pieces into a scene, or if one of the
actresses declares the line her favorite, then the season for the
designer accelerates like fashion quicksand. Once one of her designs
slinks on a famous bod everyone will be clamoring for the exact same
look in boutiques and department stores everywhere.
Kingsley knows this. She has lived the life of the designer du jour
once before. She tasted fame when she was too green to know how lucky
she was, and then experienced its fickleness. Her two new collections
have been positively received, she says. Upscale boutiques like
Bucktown's p.45 are buying her line. She's again being written up in
fashion magazines, like a glowing notice in Elle and an upcoming mention
in Lucky. The week prior to this interview she flew to New York, and
again showed her lines with stylists, buyers and editors. Magazines like
Harper's Bazaar, Women's Wear Daily and Vogue. Barneys and Bendel's
are interested. There must have been a hint of déjà vu to the trip. So
Kingsley still seems cautious, trying not to sound too certain while
still crossing her fingers.
Kingsley sits at her desk in her modern, streamlined office, the
model of efficiency. Sarah Jessica Parker looking pregnant yet fabulous
on the cover of W fans out on her desk. As soon as the tape recorder is
on, she measures her statements, leaning back in her chair, long fingers
touching each other. On one hand rests a mammoth silver ring, her only
embellishment. She's talking about her desire for her clothes to be
accessible, rehearsing her mission statement. "I think you can be
different and edgy and interesting and make clothes that people can wear
and feel good about wearing," she says. "I mean, that's the reason I
make clothes. I make clothes so if you're a woman, and you put on my
clothes, you feel good in them. I don't want to design clothes in my
basement for five people."
In a magazine profile years ago she indicated her imminent ambitions
to start a men's line. She pauses. "I totally want to make a
men's line. I'm, like dying to make a men's line. I want to
make a men's line, and I want to make a kid's line. Like that Lisa
Kingsley collection I think would be so cute, little camis for
babies..." She laughs with a feathery sort of giggle, but then sobers
up. "I think it would be fun to do those things, but we just have to
grow these lines right now." The idealistic naiveté of an artist is now
balanced by the practical demands of a businesswoman, who has six
financiers investing in her Chicago company and who is especially PR
conscious. She talks in terms of building foundations. "I believe in
working hard. And I believe in not settling for mediocrity. I want to
uncover every stone, and look under there, and go, OK, that was a
mistake, and it turned out really really well, so let me learn from that
mistake, and study it." Back to the camisole that started it all. Fresh out of art school,
first in Pasadena and then Chicago's School of the Art Institute,
Kingsley was living in the bohemian Silver Lake district of Los Angeles,
freelancing as a graphic designer while trying to write for film. She
was shopping a screenplay around entitled "Counting to Infinity," a
drama set half in Africa and half in Chicago, based on the experiences
of someone she knew growing up in Evanston. "It was about her
relationship to this continent of Africa and how she felt she wanted to
go there and discover her roots, and she had to get there. And she did.
She went there, and as she was working there in the Peace Corps, she
started realizing in fact that a lot of her roots were here in
Chicago," remembers Kingsley.
While Miramax was reading her script, she traveled in Bali for a
month-long reprieve. "And I fell in love with Bali. I had never been to
Asia before. I have complete addiction to Southeast Asia now.
I've been everywhere over there since then." She fell hardest for the
brilliant fabrics that the natives would wrap around themselves in
sarongs.
She imported the textiles from Bali, and stitched together dozens of
these camisoles, little tank tops with spaghetti straps made out of
Indian sari material and ranging the spectrum in color. "I was there
with a friend, and we were like, wow, you can make these cool things for
a dollar, let's bring a whole bunch back, and we'll give them away to
friends or whatever." When Kingsley returned to Los Angeles, she just
happened to give one to her friend, an art director for Maverick,
Madonna's record company, who just happened to give the camisole to
Madonna. Keep in mind this is during Madonna's hippie mama phase, when
she fetishized all things Eastern. "And she was like, 'Oh my God, I
love these, I want them in every color,'" remembers Kingsley. "It was
like, wait, wait now, wait a minute, Madonna likes these? This could be
something interesting."
Then Fred Segal called. Or one of the vice presidents of the Melrose
fashion haven, who told her to sell him everything she had made. The
camisoles flew off the hangers. "I took that as a sign to go back to
Bali and make more clothes," says Kingsley. "Because I felt, like,
first of all, this was something I loved doing. And um, it's very hard
to get a screenplay sold." She laughs. "Talk about--OK, you leave it
to me to, like, pick the two hardest careers on the planet. Talk to me
in fifteen years. I'll be trying to be an astronaut or something.
"But I decided, this is cool, I can do this. It's fun, I love it.
And plus, I get to go to Bali and hang out and make clothes. It doesn't
take rocket science to figure out when something lands in your lap and
it's a good thing to go and pursue it." Staying with the meteoric
metaphor, Kingsley was a rising fashion star. She was being written up
in major fashion magazines. She opened up a studio on Silver Lake
Boulevard. Bendel's bought the line. One of her sari dresses was
hanging in their storefront window on Fifth Avenue."
In Bali, she tried to learn the language. The neophyte studied the
craft by working with the experienced seamstresses in their homes,
"with chickens running around my feet, and babies crying." It was hard
work. "I was in a situation where the niche of my line was using these
fabrics that no one else could get. Because I could get them over there.
And I mean, I would sit in a hot, sweaty,
sweltering market, with no toilet, no bathroom, no nothing, and I
would try to speak Indonesian. I was dealing with Indians, Indonesians,
Chinese people, you name it," she remembers. "I was over there, in
their booth, looking to match up an aqua-dye lot to get the same dye lot
for the sari fabric, looking through piles and heaps and piles and piles
and piles of fabric. Getting the exact same color matched to what was
being ordered in New York. Because I was working kind of in a Third
World situation, but having to deal with Fifth Avenue."
Things had gotten to the point where the pressure was so overwhelming
that Kingsley could easily have burned out. She didn't have that
opportunity. During that year, the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia
fell, the economy collapsed and Bali was deemed unsafe due to rampant
riots. "While I had all this press on the newsstand, I was in the
process of my business falling apart in Bali. It was kind of
devastating. Because here I was, doing all this fun cool stuff, and it
was being accepted, and it happened right away. It wasn't that I had to
build and build and build and build to get it to the point where it was
at."
So like the protagonist in her pivotal screenplay, Kingsley moved
home to Chicago, both to save face and collect herself. Fitigues, a
local clothing company, hired her as their artistic director. "In the
meantime I decided--and I probably always knew this--that I was going to
do another label, but in a safe secure, sound environment. So I worked
at Fitigues, I had to get myself back on my feet, and while I was there,
I was also observing and learning how to do production in the United
States...what it took to put a company together that actually functioned
as a clothing company."
Her pluckiness newly refreshed, although wiser this time around,
Kingsley resigned from the company after a year and a half and sought
out investors to launch a new clothing line here in Chicago, where she
could afford the space necessary for such an endeavor. "I was obsessive
about making this company be able to stay around for a long time, and so
I laid a foundation legally, I made strategic plans, it was like 'I'm
not going to have a country collapse on me and then be out of
business.'"
If this were a screenplay, that statement would have the word
"foreshadowing" written in the margins. Before Fashion Week, she sent
out 350 "look books," basically design portfolios, to everyone who
drew the line in the sand of style, including letters telling people she
was back in business, this time with a more modern line, and that she
wasn't going anywhere.
She went to New York armed with the entire Lisaki collection, rented
a loft in Manhattan, scheduled a week's worth of appointments. Her
first day of appointments on September 10 went well. It was with the
senior designer buyer from Nordstrom's, and her interested response was
an encouraging sign. But then the next day happened. For a long time
afterwards people donned semi-permanent mourning attire and fashion
became immaterial. "I was completely wiped out," says Kingsley. "If
there was any hope for me to relaunch my line, it kind of went away at
that point." Department stores stopped buying new designer lines, says
Kingsley. There were a handful of times that she almost called it quits
in the past couple of years.
"Whereas my whole career was like a rocket ship to the moon with
this Bali thing, and everybody was wearing my clothes, and I was in
eighty-five bazillion publications, and I was like traveling to Bali,
having fashion shows in Silver Lake, before Silver Lake got hot, this
time over the past two-and-a-half years now, I have been totally and
completely humbled about what it means to do this business," she says
emphatically. And it is a business. And it is fickle. She nods
vigorously. "This is not about--I mean, it's no longer, like, 'Oh,
I'm a fashion designer and everything's great!' It's just so not
like that. It's not glamorous at all. I'm in here working twelve hours
a day. I don't take lunch because I just can't. I have so many things
to do. It is unbelievable. From ordering zipper 1ZYK6-7 in color okra to
getting on the phone with a legal partner to dealing with my showroom in
New York and what sales are happening there to designing an invitation
for a fashion show."
If she sounds like she's bitter or cynical, she doesn't mean to be.
Maybe Kingsley is just a tad more realistic about the life of a startup
fashion designer. "There are 600 really good little black dresses out
there this season," agrees Kingsley. "It's not like you're the only
one, and it's like, 'Oh my God, look at this black dress.' Fashion
editors and buyers have seen every single collection. They've seen it
all. They've seen a million great things." With obvious talent and a
lot of hustle, things are so far, so good, with the powers-that-be on
Fifth Avenue and elsewhere. "People are really loving the line," says
Kingsley.
But, still, there is a lot riding on this Lisa Kingsley label to
succeed. Last week on her trip to New York Kingsley found herself
sitting in the offices of Vogue. Vogue. What was it like, being
so close to the Holy Grail for fashionistas everywhere? "Oh my God,"
Kingsley says reverentially, almost under her breath. "You know, I
mean, part of me was sitting there going, this is so incredibly--this is
the epicenter of serious fashion, so I was excited, and part of me was
kind of like...There's a lot of pressure here. A lot." In the meantime, Kingsley's preparing for a fashion show at the
Museum of Contemporary Art next week, as well as getting ready to
premiere the two lines on a New York runway during Fashion Week. There
seems to be the usual mix of butterflies and excitement to see models
wearing her clothes. She also recently returned from Paris, on one of
her frequent "inspiration trips," and is planning on visiting India
for the first time, one of the only major destinations in Asia she has
not traveled. She was saving India to really savor it, she says.
It is when Kingsley talks about her journeys that she grows most
passionate, and the worries about the business side of things disappear.
Talking about the rich tapestry in Asia and her love affair with the
fabrics over there makes one realize the evolution from that first
Balinese camisole and how her soul gets fed when she's abroad. "If
you're in Tokyo, it's totally out there, really funky, super punk
rock. When you're in Bali in the rice paddies, people have draped
fabric and sarongs around themselves and put pieces together in
different ways that are really interesting. When you're in Bangkok,
you're looking at monks; their robes are unbelievable. Or you're
looking at prostitutes in the night market that are wearing some
unbelievable incredible stockings with some weird little skirt and some
big blousy top with their hair done in some weird way with a scarf. And
that's fashion, too."
Earlier, Kingsley hesitated before answering the question of what
designers inspire her. "I really don't believe that you're
fashionable because of what you wear, I think fashion is how you
wear what you wear. And I think that's the same way I feel about life
now. It's not about what I do, it's how I do what I
do."
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