Adam Arnold (http://www.adam-arnold.com) paces his Portland fashion studio revved up on ideas. Rail thin with red hair and skinny arms that seem to propel him about the room, he grabs a bolt of dark blue fabric from the wall, rolls it out on a high table.
He traces a pattern, lifts a huge pair of scissors and cuts out a sleeve. Words tumble out.
There was this motion machine, he says, at the science museum when he was a kid, and he’d watch the balls roll up, down, around and even upside down; and then there’s that guy –what’s his name? –who engineered geodomes; and in mathematics, that three-dimensional shape that is one-dimensional.
“You don’t know what a Mobius is?” he asks, surprised but polite.
He cuts a long, narrow, strip of paper, twists it once and tapes the ends together. He places the tip of a pen on the paper and, without lifting the point, draws a single, continuous line to show how the mark appears on the outside, inside, top and bottom: “A three-dimensional object with one side.”
He gestures with the giant scissors, so animated it seems he might accidentally trim his neat red beard. Or worse. He darts across the room, bends over a plastic crate on the floor and rummages. Clothes fly. He can’t find what he wants. He digs through a second box then turns abruptly to snatch a navy blue sleeveless dress from a metal rack. He thrusts it forward. The front of the garment forms an intriguing shape.
“The Mobius dress,” he says.
A blur of ideas
Arnold, 35, designs remarkable clothes. His Mobius dress has what appears to be a never-ending knot at the neckline. A man’s sweater vest features keyhole cutouts. Yet another dress consists of dozens of octagonal shapes of fine charcoal-gray wool. Hundreds of tiny seams give it unique, yet classic, style. The inside looks like a jewel-toned honeycomb, the pieces lined in multiple colors.
Most designers try to solidify ideas, gathering magazine pictures, sketches and photos to create storyboards that help sharpen their focus. Arnold works the opposite way. His ideas blur. They flash bright one second, disappear into darkness the next. He follows one. It leads to another. Like running after fireflies with a tattered net, the fun for him is in the chase.
“I try to be influenced by art, music, dreams, random ideas, colors, fabrics, texture, construction –but not fashion,” he says. “That just seems incestuous to me.”
Arnold is perhaps Portland’s most creative clothing designer. His garments aren’t sold in stores; rather he works from his studio sketching ideas, developing patterns and stitching every piece himself. He creates made-to-measure and one-of-a-kind pieces by appointment only.
The quality of the construction is high. His prices reflect that. His octagon dress starts at $800; in New York, customers might pay $2,000 for such a garment. Being in a fashion capital could help put him on a national stage; the number of clients for custom clothing is smaller in Portland. But here, Arnold enjoys an aesthetic freedom. His clients are often creative types –photographers, graphic designers, filmmakers –willing to spend more money on clothing that is unique and handmade.
For 10 years, he’s survived solely on his designs, slowly building a business without loans or debt.
“The first five was the kind of design you don’t want to do; upholstery, costumes for plays, kids’ hats –all to survive,” he says. “You are hungry, you have a bill, you have to figure out something to make. It was a constant state of survival.”
