Designer Cut a Brand-New Career From Whole Cloth

I t sounds like an algebra problem: If Leslie Deane of Aliso Viejo travels 110 miles round-trip to the California Mart in downtown Los Angeles four days a week to bring fabrics to designers Carol Little, ABS Clothing, Leon Max and Guess?, and she’s been doing it for three years, how many miles has her car endured?

The answer?

More than Deane likes to think about.

But she still loves her job. Deane bolts to Los Angeles to represent mills in Italy, Japan, Germany, India, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Mexico and the United States. She is also on the board of a textiles association in Los Angeles, which awards scholarships to talented fashion students.

This is another in a series of first-person columns that allow people connected to the fashion industry to talk about their encounters.

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I look at my work as one big obstacle course. The garment business is a get-down environment. There is little glamour, but it is exciting when a trend takes off and you’re in the right place at the right time. This has happened to me on several occasions.

Textiles can take you on an international journey anthropologically and sociologically. The habits of people can be expressed in their crafts and their art forms. People express themselves through textiles and clothing.

One day, 20 years ago, I was a lab technician and I decided I didn’t want to do that anymore. I happened to go to the Cal Mart, and I wanted a job there, but I didn’t have any experience.

I begged and finally got a job working with fabrics for $150 a week. I was raising a son on that. I knew nothing about fabrics, but I just took to it immediately.

My specialties are different and novelty fabrics like textural fabrics, Jacquards and laundered anything. I look for the California versus the New York look.

If it’s selling well in New York, it may not work here because we’re more casual. Even in suiting. I represent a velvet mill, and we got then to launder the velvet for a crinkly look for California.

I represent one of the two velvet mills in this country; it was started 150 years ago. I have developed a special printing process on velvet that renders an antique look--it makes the velvet looks like it came from a museum. The mill now use this method which was once only done by hand silk-screen.

I also represent a company that uses a new fiber called Tencel. This is an environmentally friendly fabric that is casual in appearance and very soft. At first, some people called it an ecology gimmick, as if it were capitalizing on the ecology theme, but it turned out to be a nice, soft fabric. It is made from wood pulp and it gets better as you wash it. It’s a denim and rayon kind of look and feel. Esprit uses it.

It’s expensive because it’s new. A new fabric is always a dollar more than it will eventually be. The cost per yard for most fabrics is $4 to $12, and there are about 40 yards on a bolt. You can get about 13 dresses off a bolt. A bolt can cost almost as much as a piece of art, up to $500.