story by Dana Varon
photos by Aeric Meredith Goujon
LA based Stacey Clark and her assistant designer Harold Kuhn are cool and they are young. Budding into the scene with their Odilon Fall 2011 collection, their third, Clark feels this is one of her most mature shows, which in turn shows her growth. Fittingly, the Greek goddess Persephone, who has a classic story of growing, inspired it. Starting as a young, naïve girl, she got taken by Hades, got her heart broken, found out that the world is not such a wonderful place, eventually evolving into a jaded, sad, and unwilling goddess of the underworld. But a bit of her innocence remained. The designer wanted this line to reflect that journey, but with the added element of psychedelic rock and roll, like an acid trip via Sergeant Pepper’s, circa 1970.
Throughout her presentation, you see a girl wearing comfy but clean knit woolen capes, crop tops turn to gold and rust twill suits, and baby doll dresses gilded with 1930’s dead-stock vintage gold thread fringes. To taupe sequins tops and tunics with slight but sparkly pomegranate pieces glittered amongst black and rust iridescent silk removable collars and black suede/knit cropped jackets. Her hands are painted muted darks to red. Black double knit baby dolls with shoulder cutouts and flowy olive jumpsuits are ingénue to adult, as are the plat-formed penny loafers they were paired with. Culminating with long black chiffon dresses, palazzo pants and the most divine floor length black hooded wool coat the transformation was complete from girl to woman. Ever the multi-dimensional artist (Ms. Clark studied painting, sculpting and art history before she realized that she ultimately expresses herself best with clothes), a film she produced flashed nearby with images of a goddess-like girl in all her outfits set to rock and roll.
