Lynchburg native’s styles on dispay
By Casey Gillis on May. 12, 2010
(434) 385-5525
Ali Ferguson has a serious problem on her hands.
“Mom,” she says nervously, “Mani’s leg is broken.”
Luckily, it’s nothing a little wood glue can’t fix.
The aspiring designer, 20, is talking about her trusty mannequin, which she’s nicknamed Mani. She bought the dress form, which has no head, arms or legs, three years ago and has been using it as a key part of her design process ever since.
Ferguson, a Jefferson Forest graduate and current VCU fashion design student, doesn’t sketch or use patterns when creating a garment.
“I know what I want it to be,” she says. “I don’t like to draw it out first. I just drape the fabric on the mannequin … and I just kind of go from there.”
A collection of her work will be on display at Fifth Street’s Dancing Leaf Gallery through the end of May.
“We try to find something different every month,” says owner Cheri Payne. “Art is a lot of different things.”
Ferguson and her mother, Tamera, set the show up last week and had to do some emergency surgery when one of Mani’s three wooden feet fell off.
Once the problem was fixed, they were back at it, slipping Ferguson’s designs onto Mani and the other forms she brought to display her work — a collection of skirts, shirts, dresses, vests and even a bathing suit.
Three of the garments were made from deconstructed pieces of clothing.
One, a variation on the little black dress, would make a “Project Runway” contestant proud: Ferguson took apart three pairs of men’s swim trunks, seam by seam, and rebuilt them into a short dress, with a corset-style top and full skirt.
Other items include a green skirt, originally a men’s blazer that she bought at Goodwill, and a vest Ferguson made using purple leather she found in her furniture-designer father’s workshop.
The oldest piece is a short green dress she made from fabric her mom was using for their dining room drapes. Ferguson began the construction when she was 10 and continued with it off and on until she finished it last year.
“It was before I learned what fabrics were for what garments,” she says. “So I used drape fabric.”
Some of her earliest memories involve observing her mother, whom Ferguson says was always sewing something.
“I’ve always been around it,” says Ferguson, who hopes to eventually attend New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. “I always wanted to do something with design and fabric. It just love the industry. … There’s so much I can do.”
She finds inspiration everywhere, whether it’s in the boxes full of fabric she’s bought and saved over the years — “I still know what I want to do with (each piece),” she says. “It’s just getting the time.” — or the binders full of images she’s cut out of magazines like Elle and Vogue since she was little.
“I remember asking her, ‘Honey, what are you doing?’” Tamera Ferguson says. “She said she’d use them one day.”
To hear Tamera tell it, Ferguson has always embraced her own sense of style.
“She’s dressed herself since she was itty bitty,” she says. “Since then, it’s been very easy for her. She’s always been very self-assured. She knows what she wants, and she’ll do it.
“(Today) she’ll grab a form and just drape it and make it that way. It’s really natural for her.”
IF YOU’RE GOING: The Dancing Leaf Gallery is located at 409 Fifth St. For more information, call (434) 528-4940.
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