With its own fashion week, a Top 10 design school, and a wealth of clothing companies, Columbus is home to a thriving fashion scene – enough for one 2012 study to determine that the city has the nation’s third-highest number of fashion designers behind New York City and Los Angeles.
“Fashion is built into our culture here in Columbus,” said Thomas McClure, the founder and executive director of the Columbus Fashion Council.
McClure calls the Columbus fashion community, with its ecosystem of designers, makeup artists, models, photographers and others, a “theater of artistry.”
Five local designers sat down with The Dispatch to discuss that artistry and the future of couture in Columbus.
Maris Equi
Matthew Chess and Rian Ismadia said they’re lucky neither of them is crazy.
The pair met online in 2015 and immediately hit it off but faced a problem: Ismadia lived in Indonesia.
“It was cold and I was bored and I’m just like, ‘How about I just go to Indonesia?'” said Chess, who studied communication and education at Ohio State University.
Ismadia ended up joining Chess in the United States, where the duo pursued their interest in swimwear and underwear design, launching their Maris Equi brand in 2017.
“It’s passion-driven, right from the get-go,” said Ismadia, who studied international business in Indonesia and the Netherlands. “We know what we like to see and what we like personally in a swimsuit. So, that’s what we did.”
Two years after its founding, Maris Equi landed a spot on the Fashion Week Columbus runway.
“It just seemed ludicrous that we would be able to get into this fashion show because it’s mostly ornate gowns,” Chess said. “I think we literally submitted our application when there was like five minutes [left].”
Chess and Ismadia see the future of fashion as digital. The duo has been expanding their product line and creating digital 3-D renderings of their designs that allow consumers to “wear” their fashion online, in photos or on Zoom meetings.
“It’s our response to the future and I like being part of the future,” Ismadia said. “I don’t want to be left behind.”
Xantha Ward
Xantha Ward can’t remember when she wasn’t sewing and creating, starting with reconstructed garments and a material tough enough to ruin sewing machines.
“I started with denim because I couldn’t afford fabric at that time,” said Ward, who founded her fashion design firm in 1987 with a style she describes as avant-garde, contemporary funk and unisex.
Before becoming a full-time designer, Ward worked at National City Bank.
“I quit, and everybody said, ‘You’re crazy!’ ” she said. “I had great benefits and everything. I had really only been there a year. But I just said, ‘This is not what I want to do.’ So I left … and started designing. Here we are 30-something years later, that’s all I’ve ever done.”
The collection Ward started after leaving her job was called “Ghetto Blues,” inspired by navigating life with a daughter in a poor area.
“What I used to do, fast fashion is doing it faster,” she said. “That is very hard to compete with because their prices are a lot cheaper. So right now and with my denim, I make one-of-a-kind pieces and they’re very unique. That keeps my brand in the forefront.”
Ward spends more time now pursuing high-fashion and couture styles outside of denim, in addition to jewelry, finding inspiration from textures and patterns in tropical fish and the natural world.
Ward, who operates a studio on North Hamilton Road in Whitehall, has showcased her designs internationally, but says that doesn’t define success for her.
“I know when I’m successful, because I know my life and my history,” she said. “I really believe that my clients are my celebrities, because they have kept me in business for over 20-something years. No, I don’t believe I made it because I did it internationally. I just know my story and where I came from.”
Joan’s Bridal Couture
Joan Madison made her first wedding dress at age 13.
“I started sewing at the age of seven, so by 13, I was seasoned,” Madison said with a laugh.
A native New Yorker, Madison came to Columbus in 1996 with The Limited, where she ran the tech design department before taking a similar position at Express. A graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology and Syracuse University, she studied fashion design but also knew she needed to learn more.
“In my soul, I’ve always wanted to have my own [designs],” she said. “I tell every young designer, you have to do the work. You have to work for other designers because how can you know what to do or how to run a business?”
Madison opened Joan’s Bridal Couture in 2006, featuring both custom gowns for clients and her own collections, which she has shown at international fashion shows.
“After being here, I knew in my heart this is home and this is where I wanted to open my business,” she said. “I just found that Columbus really afforded me a lot of opportunities that I’ve always wanted to do in New York, but just couldn’t afford to do so.”
Her newest body of work is called Uthabiti, a Swahili word for resilience after difficulty. Madison said she was inspired by global world events like the COVID-19 pandemic and political unrest. Her fashion response is to juxapose colorful patchwork sequined fabric with solid black fabric.
“I feel that it also was a struggle between good and evil,” she said. “Everyone was having this reckoning, it was almost like a reckoning of the soul. And everyone was going through it and was touched on some sort of level. It’s like, who are you underneath when you’re struck with adversity?”
Madison says local designers are “bringing couture to Columbus.”
“I’ve seen the growth and it’s just been amazing and exciting,” she said. “We’re like a family.”
Malvar = Stewart
Celeste Malvar-Stewart knows the names of all the alpacas she uses to create her gowns.
Using the ancient technique of wet felting, which converts raw wool into a textile with the help of moisture and agitation, Malvar-Stewart is able to create unusual and sustainable designs. Her garments are dyed using natural materials she grows or forages, and her textiles are created with rainwater.
“I want these pieces to be heirloom pieces that go from generation to generation, which is sustainable,” she said. “But if for some reason, at any time in its lifetime, somebody decides to chuck it, you can throw this into the earth and it’s completely biodegradable.”
Because of her felting technique, Malvar-Stewart, who operates Malvar = Stewart studio in German Village, is able to create an entirely seamless silhouette down the leg of the gown.
Malvar-Stewart realized how much waste she was creating as a designer after she graduated from the American College in London, which is now Regent’s University. She began her design career in San Francisco before moving to New York.
“When I was in San Francisco, I started my own brand,” she said. “And these bins were filling up and they were overflowing. I was like, ‘I’m creating so much waste, how do I continue to create high-end pieces with no waste?’ That’s when I went back and got my Master’s at Eastern Michigan University and then I started to manipulate fibers.”
After seven years in New York, Malvar-Stewart landed in Columbus.
“My husband was a professor and a researcher at Columbia University, and he was part of a lab,” she explained. “They recruited the entire lab to Children’s Hospital and OSU. …But then I was just like, ‘What am I going to do?’ … I found out that we’re third in the nation in terms of the concentration of fashion designers, but I noticed that there weren’t a lot of independent fashion designers.”
Malvar-Stewart embraced the local designer world, and now serves on the Greater Columbus Arts Council board and teaches at the Columbus College of Art and Design. She also teaches a Farm to Fashion program where participants tour an alpaca and sheep farm to learn every step of scarf creation.
Malvar-Stewart is taking sustainable design one step further with her new project “Grassroots,” in which she plans to put grass seeds in felt so the garment literally grows.
“When we first moved, people couldn’t understand this stuff,” she said. “I was like ‘No, no, no, this is where you’re supposed to be because this is how you change the world.’ “
Encinas Designs
Gerardo Encinas expected to return to Mexico after visiting his sister in Columbus two decades ago.
“But I met my partner,” he said. “We’ve been together for the past 21 years.”
Together, the couple opened an event planning company in 2003, primarily working with the Latino community. In 2016, Encinas went to his first Fashion Week Columbus show.
“Fashion was always my passion, since I was a kid,” he said. ” I was like, ‘Okay, now I can follow my dreams because we have Fashion Week Columbus.’ “
Encinas also worked with the Miss Ohio Latina pageant for six years. Between that and trying to build his own designer label, he decided to close his event planning business shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic.
A self-taught designer, Encinas learned his techniques from YouTube and has gone on to work with celebrities like Nina West, who appeared on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” and Tiffany Moon of “The Real Housewives of Dallas.” Encinas said in 2019, he made 50 dresses for West.
In 2020, the designer pivoted to making facemasks during the pandemic and eventually moved his studio to South Third Street Downtown.
In addition to working on his studio, Encinas is focused on designing sexy, big sequined gowns, and regularly finds inspiration from what people are wearing in Columbus.
“I love the drama on the runways,” Encinas said. “I love to see people’s faces every time a dress comes out.”
@E_SkidmoreGS
eskidmore@gannett.com
