Arts [ Persona ] Designing my Life December 2006

by Denise Swenson
Photos by Adrienne Gammiere

The dark and bright parts of her life have worked together to bring Denise to her present position as a Peninsula dress designer and fashion consultant extraordinaire.

I was born in Los Angeles. My earliest memories include designing clothes by wrapping fabric around my dolls and thus, in my opinion, transforming them into objects of beauty and delight.

My mother enrolled me in dancing classes when I was only three. I studied ballet and toe (en pointe) forms. I especially loved the costumes we wore for the recitals. Fabrics that you wouldn’t wear under normal circumstances, such as fine netting (tulle) and embroidered silks, or satins that could transform me into a fairy princess.

Ballet fed my imagination and developed within me a love for classical music that I still retain. Our dance director would tell us, “Close your eyes, listen to the music, and create a story.” I loved those experiences! Even today I play classical music when I’m designing, letting the music catch up my spirit and sending the creative juices coursing through my veins.

Coming into My Art
My parents divorced when I was two and my dad had custody of us every weekend. He was a good absentee father. He loved us and supported our interests. He would give me little kits for making doll clothes and jewelry. I loved cutting and pasting whether with fabric, paper, sequins, or yarn.

I especially loved the colors and the feel of textured material between my fingers. I enjoyed putting fabrics and colors together in combinations that I had never seen before.

I got into professional modeling when I was five and worked at that for the next couple of decades. My mom taught me to sew also when I was five and got me started on knitting when I was seven.

I had a very active mind and found school to be a real bore. I would finish my work and then begin knitting in the back of the class. This occasionally would get me into trouble with the teacher, but on the whole my knitting in class was regarded as a good thing. Because my other problem was that I liked to talk all the time and while I was tending to my knitting I was usually (though not always) not engaged in conversation with the person sitting next to me. The teacher let me knit sometimes just to keep me quiet.

At age 12 my family moved from LA to Sacramento after my stepfather got a job there. Sacramento seemed like a cow town after living near Hollywood. And, in fact, back in those days the place was very rural. I continued dancing, plus doing runway and print modeling. However, I’m sure there were more photographic shoots in that place calling for fly-spattered cows as models than for nubile young girls.

One good thing that happened during that time was that I began making my own clothes using a sewing machine. Even better is the fact that I got to know on a regular basis my maternal grandmother who lived in Sebastopol.

Grandmama was from Sweden and served tea every afternoon. It was always my job to set the table. Grandma had rows and rows full of fancy mugs. I was able to select placemats and napkins from her great assortment. I used all different colors, but imagined that they matched in some fashion. My grandmother was a wonderful woman who would never try to correct my tastes. Anything I picked out always suited her fine.

Setting that table seems like a trivial task, in retrospect, but the simple challenge provided me a pleasurable and satisfying outlet for my creative energies.

Getting Down to Business
I earned spending money in high school by making fancy gowns for the school’s choral groups. The girls would choose the colors and styles they wanted. I would then get a stack of patterns and do mix-and-match among them. I would take a sleeve from one pattern, a bodice from another, a skirt from a third. I would make my own designs for any missing elements cutting out patterns from newspapers.

I also designed and sewed together costumes for the school’s plays. I was fearless in my ignorance; there was nothing that I couldn’t do, or at least try to do. Everyone liked the results so by that standard, at least, I was successful.

When I was 19 I started my own business designing loungewear and caftans, which are oversized comfortable garments. I glammed them up with such things as rayon capes, hoods, and rhinestone jewelry. I sold my pieces to two area stores. I was having fun, making money, and developing a clientele. I created a stir at my senior prom by wearing one of my own creations.

I spent four years, from 1992 through 1996, studying Apparel Design and learned how to draft patterns from measurements. I also learned some things about making garments hang properly from a German clothing designer named Ilse Wilson. Ilse had come up through the apprentice system. She taught me couture techniques that I never could have learned in any other way.

After graduation I spent four months in la belle France. I would gladly have become a permanent French resident but could find no work. When I got back to the States, I worked in retail as a manager and buyer in Sacramento and then in Hollywood. Getting back into the LA lifestyle was a relief! The area has a pervasive spirit of wheeling and dealing because everyone is into potential and seems to be planning to do something else besides the job they are doing.

I began to work with a line of Swedish Skincare products and eventually ended up back in Sacramento. I was very successful and made a lot of money, becoming the company’s West Coast training manager, as well as doing my own selling. I was one of the top five area managers and grew a large organization.

I finally went into business for myself and opened my own image consulting company, called About Face. I had a retail store and also did consultations and classes. I sold skincare and makeup products, and designed custom accessories like belts and jewelry. Channel 3 offered me a regular five-minute spot doing makeup and skin care techniques. I was working long days and nights.

But my real passion has always been for designing and making beautiful clothes.

How I Design a Dress
There are many different ways to approach clothing design. I have several ways myself. One of my favorite design processes is to get ideas from pictures. For example, I have a book of designs in black-and-white by Erte. The man was an amazingly creative individual whose designs were featured for decades on magazine covers. Erte’s designs were all created in pen and paints. I don’t know how many of them were ever made into actual clothing.

I appreciated the fact that Erte’s books usually portrayed his designs in black-and-white, which focused attention upon the lines and spaces of the design, leaving people like me free to do with the colors as I wished.

I look through books like Erte’s, not so I can simply copy designs but as a way of energizing the creative process. Any act of creation has sources in other things that have been done before. I’ll see something that a woman is wearing and marvel at how the style flows, for example. That flow might end up becoming some part of one of my designs long after I forgot where I had first seen it.

Another favorite technique for creating a dress is to begin with a piece of fabric. I do something analogous to the sculptor who believes he is freeing the figure that he sees imprisoned within a block of marble, looking at the color of the material in various lighting situations and testing how it feels in my hands. I’m studying the fabric to see what it wants to be when it grows up.

Another factor comes into play when approaching design from the standpoint of the fabric. I’m not interested merely in what the material will lend itself to and how the colors play, but I also want to see how it wears on the person’s body. Some clothes fit like boxes, not matching the curves of the wearer.

Beyond Fashion Into Life and Healing
My designs are geared towards making women feel good about themselves. In high school I told my counselor that I wanted to be a social worker or a clothing designer. He said, “You can’t do both.” But you can. Both careers prepare the professional to confront vulnerability, practice intimacy, and lift people up.

By working with young women I learned that I’m good at empowering people — helping them develop their self-confidence, teaching them about self-image, and showing them that life is a process. We can use whatever we experience, whether good or bad, to better understand ourselves and each other. Some of the young women I taught are now bringing their daughters to me.

I became gifted in imparting these messages in non-threatening ways and discovered how effective I am in front of groups and in front of cameras. I have good camera and stage presence.

In LA I volunteered to teach skin-care and makeup to girls in prison. I was 22 years old. The staff was right out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “Are you going to be OK?” Nurse Ratched asked me just before she locked me in that place.

I wasn’t afraid because even as a young woman I knew that everyone wants to be seen and acknowledged. Those “incorrigible” girls were merely anxious to be seen as human beings. People rebel against any category they feel put in so I didn’t put them into any category but just accepted them as who they were. My mission was to help them to love the person each of them was. My tools were personal acceptance and the tools of fashion.

The girls spent the first session practicing how to walk tall and with shoulders back. They learned the physiological advantages of not slouching. The girls began practicing their walk all the time. Later we did skin care, learning about using moisturizers to remove makeup.

All my lessons in working with those wonderful human beings had to do with self-love and with taking care of their bodies.

The transformations were amazing! I gave them something to share with each other and to talk about. I presented them with another dialect — teaching them the language of wholeness and beauty.

A person who feels ugly or unattractive will focus on those negative perceptions and never find a path to that inner place where they can have sufficient self-respect to begin the healing process. Learning to feel better about oneself is the path to healing our inner wounds. Such healing requires a sense of confidence within ourselves.

There are many ways to reach the confidence that I’m talking about. For example, my mom fell victim to muscular dystrophy while I was in my 20s. For eight years she could still dress herself. Then she had to use a walker. She spent the final two decades of her life confined to a wheelchair.

As the disease progressed, mom finally became a quadriplegic. Her mind was lucid, but she finally was able only to turn her head.

My mom always liked such things as draped necklines and feminine clothes. I created long skirts designed to hide her swelling legs, or covered them with brightly colored stockings — making sure that the coverings on the arms of her wheelchair matched the clothes she was wearing. She loved it! I’m sure this helped brighten those otherwise darkened days.

Some people go overboard with the self-improvement process, submitting to unnecessary plastic surgery and getting Botox injections.

I think it is a ghastly impulse for any woman to inject a substance into her body to deaden muscles so they can’t move. That’s what Hollywood is about — injections, face-lifts, augmentations, and tucks. In many cases these things point to deep insecurities that our culture creates in a woman, forcing her to focus upon how she looks and not upon who she is.

Into the Valley
In spite of the wisdom of my teachings, I almost destroyed my own life. I derived my set of skills for dealing with men from my mom who was married to an alcoholic. During my 20s in LA I was unprepared for the kind of attention I received from men.

My husband was strong, well known, with a good reputation. He loved my runway-model style. I became his trophy wife. He dominated me completely and I lost track of who I was. He effectively canceled out everything that I had been or done. He made me feel worthless.

I spent seven long years going through a nasty and painful divorce. Both of my beloved parents died during that time. I was broken in spirit. I plumbed the depths of psychological suffering and spiritual pain.

In my despair I made the discovery that the dark nighttime of the soul is actually a good place in which to engage in the processes of introspection and reevaluation. The healing process went on for a number of years.

“That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” It’s become trite, but Von Goethe’s quote is right on. 

It has been a long path and difficult, but the darkness is finally behind. I’ve emerged into the sunlight and feel that I’ve reached the best point of my life. I am Phoenix risen from the ashes.

I’m planning to revive my message of wellness and self-love for the women in Monterey. This is what I find to be most fulfilling of all! Society has gone a long way in recognizing women as human beings, but there’s still a challenge for us to understand ourselves and to reject the false standards that the media has set for us.

Even in the old days the charm schools and finishing schools didn’t address the inner person. It’s nice to have manners, but we need to go beyond manners and move into substance. We need to not just act mannerly towards the world; we must love the world passionately, starting with ourselves.

From Here Onward
Now I’m back to my first love, designing clothes. My designs are generally shown at fashion shows, hosted either by individuals who appreciate my artistry, or as fundraising events for non-profit groups.

I show my clothes by appointment at various venues, and at Trunk Showings where the designs are available to try on and purchase in the absence of seeing models presenting the clothes.

I have a collection of vintage buttons and textiles, which I often use in my designs, plus hand-painted and hand-woven fabrics.

Most of my pieces are one-of-a-kind, though I do some limited production of pants, skirts, and tops. I am available by appointment for private consultation for an individual design, or for a whole wardrobe.

Teaching of the arts has declined along with an associated decline in good taste. I’m sure that qualities of excellent judgment are being lost, and I’m appalled by some of the style choices that people make. Out-of-the-box thinking has atrophied.

We all need to learn to create beautiful things in our lives; we need to learn to dance. We need less of George Lucas (whom I love, actually) and more of Antionio Vivaldi.

I abhor anything that’s mundane, mediocre, or repetitious. I love the ever changing kaleidoscope of colors, textures, and patterns available to fashion designers.

The wonderful simplicity of solid colors is enhanced by some rich texture or other, therefore, I especially enjoy working with silks, woolens, tapestry, and brocades — sumptuous fabrics, beautifully cut, artfully styled, and skillfully constructed.

A great design, like a good life, depends upon balance, proportion, and color — all working together to create a thing of grace, beauty, and elegance. These are the kind of clothes I intend to design; this is the kind of life I seek to live. °

You can learn more about Denise and her designs by going to her website www.deniseswensondesigns.com. Or call her at 831-644-6148.