Filed under: Beanstockd
Designer Elisa Jimenez, the token hippie from Project Runway’s Season 4, has got “indie” in her blood. Born to an independent sculptor and graphic designer, she learned young that “you make things, you know. You make things and that’s how you make your living.” What’s more, she learned, you make them right – and to hell with the nay-sayers.
“If someone didn’t like what I was wearing, I’d be like, “Yeah, whatever. I know if you see it in a magazine in two years, you’ll wear it, so it doesn’t bother me.”
Today, Jimenez hand-produces her own line of curve-enhancing women’s apparel using sustainable fabrics like organic cotton, plant-based Ingeo fiber, sea cellulose made from algae, and corn silk.
“I’m purposely treating all the fabrics so that they look like what people consider an excellent microfiber – looks like, and hangs like, but in truth, this is actually a cellulose fabric, one of the fabrics I worked with this season for my spring collection [titled Urban Nomad].”
Her creations are designed to be what she (and Stephen Hawking before her) calls “polymorphic,” or adaptable to different styles, functions, and sizes.
“It comes from this concept that matter can be motivated to change at any given moment. Maybe you have a jacket that can also be a dress, that can also be a skirt – or there’ll be just 3 holes, but it makes like15 things.”
The metaphor of changeability, and with it, sustainability, carries well over into her personal life – as well as her vision for the industry. Four years ago, as she revealed on the show, the artist nearly died in a severe car accident that left her in a 5-day-long coma. Since then, she’s had to work at re-gaining strength and re-defining her life’s purpose.
“You have to know that there’s something you’re supposed to do –love your man, be a good voice, and especially if you’re going to have attention brought to you, you’ve gotta do something good.”
Jimenez now sings of a so-called “new, green re-industrial revolution,” appropriate to this year’s 100th anniversary of the Ford Model T, which would embrace sustainable rather than assembly-line manufacturing as the new industry norm.
“How many non-biodegradable fabrics are going into landfills every year,” she asks, “and nobody even thinks about it because they’re last season? You have to have a shift right now to a sustainable industry, both in materials and the way products are created.”
“It’s a huge thing to try to change, it really is,” she admits. “But you have to make it cool first! And that’s why we’re all talking right now.”
Project Runway let the artist-advocate test her ambitions against the eminently “cool” (if Lifetime-bound) mainstream tide. Looking back, she describes being on the show as “a surreal behavioral reality experiment” and “an incredible Vision Quest experience.” But to contestants, producers, and viewers alike, her methods rang of bizarre counter-cultural zeal.
“Obviously, my character was the one that was really questionably out there,” she muses. Marking fabric for a cut with her own saliva made her known as “the girl who spits on clothes” – an epithet she still hears in line at the video store. (“Let’s talk about dry-cleaning,” she shoots back. “If you think a blessing mark that takes 2 seconds to make is a bad thing, let’s talk about dry-cleaning and what it does to the environment.”)
As for the chocolate-themed dark velvet dress that got her kicked off the show, “I think it was the fact that I was trying to go the middle of the ground, and it didn’t quite hit the mark at all,” she admits.
“That whole thing that Heidi evidently said about how she was expecting me to come out there and be like happy, happy, and nice, nice, and beautiful, beautiful, because it was all sugar? The thing is, I’ve been a sugar addict all my life so I don’t see sugar that way… I see it like a drug.”
Taking all misperceptions in stride, Jimenez has moved on to a new corporate-industry scheme: to pitch a “totally eco line” to a big Target-like establishment eager to tap the current green fashion wave. And she has good reason to hope: the recent winner of Runway’s Season 5 is unabashedly green designer, Leanne Marshall.
A powerful tide is turning her way, she laughingly realizes.
“All of a sudden, I’m popular – who knew?”
Mainstream acceptance, once hardly wished for by the self-admitted “odd one out,” may be up next for Elisa Jimenez. And “slam-packed in the middle of pop culture and luxury concepts” the dialogue for environmental change may yet re-ignite.
Sharon Margolis
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wow..what a lovely article..thanku so very much sharon and beanstocked for bringing attention to my works…(this is elisa)
also to note…c.l.a.s.s. showroom just opened in manhattan with its siter in milan; it is a sustainable fabric showroom open to designers and various independent creators alike..thought you might like to know about it. thrive and have wonderfilled everydays…ingrace
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