Clothes With a Happy History
There’s a sense of deja vu about Leeba Marks’ jackets.
The lush floral fabrics, charming embroidery and elegant cutwork are somehow familiar. In previous lives they were tablecloths, runners, handkerchiefs and tea towels from the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s. In their current incarnation, they evoke a sense of comfort, of home, of sunny, happy kitchens before Cuisinarts replaced eggbeaters.
That’s what Marks responded to when she, with her baby in a stroller and $5 in her pocket, first saw the vintage linens at a flea market.. A sense of nostalgia compelled her to buy two of them.
“I saw them and thought, ‘Wow, those are fun. They remind me of the kind I got from my grandmother.’ I was flipping out that day. I had to get out of the house. I hadn’t been to a flea market in probably 15 years.”
She eventually decided to have them made into button-front jackets based on her cropped, boxy design. She sold them to a friend, but that wasn’t enough. She went back the next week.
This time, she bought $300 worth.
“I was like a possessed woman,” she recalls. “I had the baby in the stroller again, and I went with a friend. I don’t know what it was. There was a hand guiding me--it was all from above. Then I got home, and my husband kind of looked at me and said, ‘Why’d you buy so many tablecloths?’ I’d never spent money like that. It was, like, the kids’ tuition money.”
In the middle of the night she set to work piecing together jackets, using tablecloths for the body and sleeves. Embroidered linens (flowers, vegetables, animals) became the pockets, collars, cuffs and back yokes as Marks used her innate ability to harmonize various patterns and colors. The final touch was mismatched vintage buttons.
“I’m very good at being able to see something and then visualize it another way,” she explains. “I love assemblage and collage. I always have. In another life I would have been an assemblage artist.”
In this life, the 36-year-old Marks is many things: a designer of jackets, a mother of six (her kids range in age from 9 weeks to 10 years), a wife, an Orthodox Jew. Asked how she manages to run a home-based business and take care of a large family, she pauses for a moment and says, “Well, I have a housekeeper, and I’m a strong girl and I have a lot of energy. And sometimes I eat chocolate and drink Snapple.”
This wasn’t Marks’ first adventure in clothing. In 1996 she sold other designers’ clothes to Orthodox women for a year out of her home but found there weren’t enough summer styles that met her customers’ needs (Orthodox women wear clothing that covers their knees, elbows and collarbones).
“I started to think, ‘I can do this,’ ” Marks recalls. “So I drew a jacket pattern, got the name of someone who could actually make a pattern and sew it, got some fabric and made some jackets.”
She sold those for about a year, along with some basic long skirts, before inspiration hit at the flea market.
Marks took her vintage jackets to neighbor and friend Louise Green, a milliner (Louise Green Millinery Co.), who believed she was onto something.
“I thought they were absolutely beautiful,” Green says. “Leeba has such faith. Where most people would be really scared to go into business with very little backing, she has such a strong religious faith, she says, ‘God will take care of it,’ and she believes it. And it seems to be working. Leeba is reaching out to the outside world with her jackets. They’re modest--they’re not low-cut, tightfitting garments. I think she wants everybody to enjoy them.”
Green helped Marks find a rep, who has been selling her jackets to stores around the country; currently she’s in about 145, from Newport Beach to Nantucket. She got a boost last year when her jackets appeared in Victoria magazine (they’re also featured in next month’s issue).
“She seems to be a person with a great eye,” says Victoria editor-in-chief Nancy Lindemeyer, owner of two Leeba Marks jackets. “I think the combination of taking something that was beloved and finding a new way to own it gives people a reassuring feeling, and my readers are very much in that vein. Most of us want to know that there are women like Leeba out there doing this.”
Terri Guichet, owner of True Blue, a women’s boutique in Newport Beach, says there’s often an immediate connection with Marks’ jackets.
“All of a sudden these women are telling me about their grandmothers and their great memories of her, how she used to bake all the time. They’ll really take a trip down memory lane.”
With her 9-week-old son Menachem Mendel (“Mendy”) nestling in the crook of her arm, Marks is unapologetic about the fact that her Fairfax neighborhood home has no colorful, funky studio.
Designing is done at the dining room table. Tablecloths and other fabric pieces sit on shelves in the living room. More fabric is piled on top of a piano and in plastic bins on the floor. Local flea markets are still her best resources.
Marks’ spring and summer jackets are made from printed tablecloths, white Battenburg lace, or linens with embroidery or cutwork. Fall jackets use overdyed linens lined with flannel or bark cloth. Holiday jackets have touches of silk velvet on the collar, cuffs and back yoke, plus fringe beading. Retail prices range from $240 to $300.
Her latest offshoot is embellishing used jeans with linens. Remnants are used as trim on the hem and appliqued patterns on the legs. She’s about to do a line of semi-mass-produced jackets made from reproduction tablecloths and embroidery that will still have individual touches.
“The women who created these linens stayed at home to be with their kids, and I’m staying home with my children,” Marks says. “I’m a mommy first, so I don’t know how much I want this to grow,” she says. “But I’m experimenting.”
Leeba Marks’ jackets are available at True Blue in Newport Beach, Margie’s in San Marino, and M. Cole in Santa Monica.
