Bluesletter: LIZZIE KIDD x RTTS Even Cowgirls Get The Blues 18/03/2021

Back in 2020, my bff Lizzie Kidd and I did a bi-continental collaboration, in lieu of a planned Summer together. After she made these beautiful taffeta baby doll dresses and bloomers, I hand embroidered them with some symbols and stories from our friendship. So happy to be finally releasing the accompanying fashion film, photoshoot, and conversation (beautifully written by my baby sister Maeve Galea). Read the piece she wrote below and watch the fun ass fashion film by Jack Atherton and Andre Shannon via this link or by clicking on any image!! So much love to everyone involved in this collaboration!!

Niamh xx

WATCH OUR FASHION FILM HERE

"I had just arrived in LA and one day I came in from yoga and there she was just like this little angel sitting on my couch," explains Lizzie Kidd of her first meeting with Niamh Galea in 2017. Kidd, a Texan designer who describes her aesthetic as 'feminine fantasy nostalgia' moved to LA at 21 to pursue a career as a costume designer in Hollywood. It was at this pivotal moment in her personal history that she met Galea, a self-confessed 'fashion nerd' who had just arrived in the city of angels from Sydney, Australia, for a summer internship at Eckhaus Latta and was staying on Kidd's couch as a guest of her then-roommate. This fated meeting would mark the beginning of what the two designers and long-distance-best friends call 'a summer of love'. During said summer, Galea became inspired by the dirty and whimsical skate culture of Venice Beach, an event that would lay the foundations for the creation of her label/alter-ego Ramp Tramp Tramp Stamp and set her on her path to be offered a place at the prestigious MFA Fashion Design & Society program at Parsons New School of Design in New York City.

Fast forward to 2020 and the two have stayed best friends despite living countries, and then coasts apart. Kidd, who has remained in LA since the two met there, had just decided to prioritise her design ambitions after three years cutting her teeth as a stylist on big-budget Hollywood films such as Us and Charlie's Angels. Having just signed the lease on her first studio space, the 25-year-old was in the midst of what she describes as a 'life bender' when the far-away threat of coronavirus became a home truth for many Americans, shutting down entire cities and claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. “I was working my ass off and then partying and I was feeling really creatively motivated and inspired and like all of a sudden, it's just like bam!,” recalls Kidd. As the outbreak of COVID-19 spread rapidly through America, Galea who moved to NYC in August 2019, found that her life “kind of fell apart” in a synchronised bam! In a matter of days Galea’s job no longer existed, her classes were cancelled, and her new home had become the global epicentre of the pandemic, leading her to make the decision to return to Australia.

Like many of us, stuck in their respective homes and with little else to do, Kidd and Galea found themselves unemployed and under-whelmed by 2020. Instead of spending summer together in LA, the two were separated by miles of Pacific Ocean, lamenting their woes over hours of FaceTime calls as they each turned to their creative practices as a release. “When we were sewing we would call each other pretty much every day and have these hours-long conversations while we were both working,” Galea remembers of those early months in lockdown. It was during one such conversation that the girls, whose friendship initially flourished during pre-party dress up sessions where they “bonded over talking through outfits and doing each others make-up and hair and all those rituals of getting ready to go out” started musing on “the glamour of wearing something loose and unfitted but made in really luxe fabrics.”

“We both love that kind of uncomplicated style of dressing for parties that's very effortless and cool,” explains Kidd. Inspired by vintage baby-doll dresses and childhood adventures, the girls suddenly realised they were accidentally designing a dress together.

“We started talking about how cute it would be to make little bloomers that matched the dress so that you could still dance and run around and be playful,” notes Galea, before Kidd adds, “with me and Niamh everything seems to happen very naturally and serendipitously.”

The dress-bloomer-two-piece-sets which were handcrafted by Kidd in her LA studio, made out of antique silk taffeta bought from a deceased estate sale on a synchronised virtual eBay shopping trip. They were then sent to Sydney where Galea has worked into the pieces with hand-embroidered motifs that reference memories and mementos of their friendship. Across the back of one of the voluminous smocks, designed to fit a US size 2-16, are the words 'You are never embarrassing, sleep with soft toys,' a reference Galea explains goes back that first summer when the two had just met. “The first time I ever went into Lizzie's room I was so shocked because there was fuck tons of soft toys all over the bed,” she remembers. “And I said, ‘dude how do you fuck anyone in here?’.” The design student who grew up in the iconic Australian beachside suburb of Bondi describes the phrase, embroidered in purple stitching against a luminous pink gingham, as “in some ways an apology for saying that,” but also as a recognition of the way the Kidd has profoundly influenced her life.

“She made me realise it's not embarrassing to sleep with soft toys and nothing in life is embarrassing when you own it and you're proud of it,” Galea says, with a laugh. “It's so funny because since then I now sleep with four soft toys and I don't really know how that happened.” It's a tangible example of the important effect each has had on the other, a sentiment Kidd shares: “I feel like we've impacted each other's lives so much and so it's only natural that we make something that is a manifestation and celebration of that.”

The collaboration is named 'Even Cowgirls Get The Blues' after the 1976 novel by Tom Robbins and takes inspiration from the story's protagonist Sissy, a hitch-hiking high-fashion model who finds herself on the only all-female ranch in America full of smooth riding cowgirls. “I read the book in quarantine and I would talk to Lizzie about it on the phone all the time and tell her about it,” says Galea, with Kidd adding: “In some ways, the characters we were creating are these cowgirls who are badass adventurers but are also hyper-feminine.”

Storytelling is central to both designers' processes. As Galea explains, “That's where so many of the motifs and poetry come from. All my pieces are like a distillation of an experience or person in my life.”

“Lizzie has completely sold me on this folklore of Texas and I'm completely cowgirls and Texas obsessed now,” Galea admits, pointing to references to Kidd's Texan roots and childhood summers spent on her grandma's farm in Mississippi that can be seen on the billowing taffeta garments and in the images shot by Maximiliano Dal Masetto as proof.

Kidd, who see herself as a 'fashion historian,' feels nostalgic about the past. “When clothing used to be a lot more personal and people owned a lot less,” she says, noting that the desire for personalisation in fashion is a change she not only welcomes but feels uniquely equipped for, potentially more so than the big fashion houses whose response is to offer customisation services that emboss your initials on a pair of identical sneakers. “I think the way fashion operates in our society is shifting to a more personal place and I think coronavirus and 2020, in general, has accelerated that change.”

It's a sentiment Galea shares, pointing out that large and medium fashion houses' reliance on global production chains has meant that the only people in the fashion industry who have not been hurt by the pandemic are small scale makers who do most of the making themselves or work with local factories. “We have more time now to make than we did before and also with people spending more time online they have more time to discover these little brands and invest in them, emotionally if not financially,” adds Galea. “I do think that in fashion communities there has been a massive shift towards legitimising these DIY or arts and crafts based small-scale brands. It’s definitely gaining momentum with becoming a more and more mainstream cultural shift.”

Both designers see it as a shift that has the potential to revolutionise what consumers come to consider luxury. “At this stage in their life, the big fashion houses like Prada and Chanel are mass-manufactured, mass-produced, basically fast fashion brands,” Kidd and Galea argue. “They just have a higher price tag because what you're basically paying for is the multi-million dollar marketing campaigns and photos of Kendall Jenner wearing it.”

It is a system that is in direct opposition to the designers' shared ethos of ethically made and sustainably sourced clothing being the ultimate luxury in fashion. “There's so much love and intention poured into the whole thing and you rarely find things that are like that anymore,” reflects Kidd, thoughtfully.

In many ways, the love Kidd describes was ever-present on the day of the shoot for 'Even Cowgirls Get The Blues'. Galea sourced props from her Grandma's house, and employed her friends to shoot, style, model and sell the collaboration, explaining, “I think there has been a real shift very recently in the way that young creative’s or young fashion designers are working and it's so much more about creating a community and supporting each other than a sense of what was traditionally the fashion landscape which was this hyper-competitive space.” The result was a set where the wine was flowing as the models Honour Munro and Sarah Grant, best friends themselves, laughed as they climbed on top of each other while wearing cowgirl hats designed by Galea's high school friend Roman Jody (whose brand Jody Just has become a go-to for Post Malone). “To style a shoot with his cowboy hats, pieces that Lizzie has made, things that I have made, the dresses and bloomers which we collaborated on, is so exciting because all these pieces have these friendships behind them and I think it says something about this sense of uplifting each other and supporting each other that is such a new thing in fashion,” adds Galea.

The jovial atmosphere on set evokes images of the glamorous shoots from fashion's heyday in the mid to late 20th century, when magazines had the budgets to fly entire teams across the world (business class) and models were plied with champagne (Dom Perignon). This is a far cry from the corporate culture that permeates through the industry today, where domestic economy flights need to be approved by three managers and its strictly forbidden to charge alcohol to the corporate account. Perhaps as Kidd and Galea suggest, smaller brands are not only better equipped to be the new home of luxury for what they represent but how they represent it. Both designers agree that making on a small scale not only allows for better design practices and products but allows fashion to remain a fun and playful mode of expression.

Kidd and Galea are part of a chorus of voices hoping to change the reality and reputation of fashion as an industry plagued by socially and environmentally unethical practices of which the pandemic and subsequent social and political upheaval have called attention to. “Fashion should be fun and playful, especially luxury,” asserts Kidd, and in the hands of designers like herself and Galea, it is.

The tenets of fun and hope are at the heart of Kidd and Galea’s work – and much-needed in the wake of a global pandemic that has brought the world to its knees. “If I'm going to make things I'm not just going to make the easy things that I feel like are going to sell, I'm going to make things that kind of gives me hope and what's more hopeful than working with people you love to make beautiful things?,” says Galea, triumphantly.

As the cliché goes – and as both girls have learnt through their friendship – love conquers all; distance, a pandemic and even (or maybe especially) the worst parts of the industry they adore.