As someone who’d almost always rather do dishes than sit down and get my work done, I was tickled to find local fashion designer Shane Gabier in his insanely cute Ukrainian Village apartment Sunday night, frantically trying to finish his latest project. “I can’t believe I’m leaving in seven hours,” he said, cutting a long, thin strip from a piece of gray cotton jersey. It would become the collar for a cocktail waitress’s top, a sample of one of 13 uniforms Gabier has designed for the staff of QT, a minimalist Manhattan hotel from Andre Balazs, the hotelier behind LA’s Chateau Marmont and Standard and the Mercer in New York.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A friend of a friend working for Kimmie Kakes, a two-person company that outsources design aspects of architectural projects, approached Gabier in September to submit his stuff to Balazs’s creative director. He and KK’s Andrew Nguyen presented three different themes: schoolboys and schoolgirls, military, and a less campy modern look with soft jersey tops and culottes for women and button-down shirts and narrow trousers for men. Kimmie Kakes thought for sure the creative director would go for the military stuff, but instead she chose Gabier’s original vision. Gabier insists it’s not what he’d normally design for himself (“I don’t usually do this kind of drapiness,” he says, gesturing to a loose asymmetrical neckline), “but for uniforms it’s kinda fun.”
In October 2002, six months after Gen Art opened its Chicago office, Gabier was one of three designers tapped for a series of shows sponsored by Chrysler to plug the PT Cruiser. At the time Gabier wasn’t even producing the designs he was showing, but now he has a sample maker here and a production assistant in New York who also works for international design collective As Four.
Gabier’s MO has always been “excessive volumes and lots of fabric,” he says, often hand-dyed and prewashed, arranged for convertibility and the illusion of layers minus the bulk. “I’m not trying to promote overt sexuality and I hate status clothes,” he says, adding that his designs can be described much the same way he can personally: “wanting to be noticed but afraid when you are, like, ‘Give me attention but not too much.’”
Ingwa; Melero’s silk, cotton, and crocheted Gypsy duds, accessorized with shiny, intricately beaded wrist and ankle cuffs, had me aching to go robbing on horseback. Katrin Schnabl’s unexpected folds of silk and cotton wrapping around the body like origami made me wish I ate sushi and collected art. I like fashion that makes me angry. I want to want my clothes and want to get pissed when I see some other lady wearing something that really should belong to me–and I left Park West Thursday night in a glorious huff.
