Her Love of Sports Transcends the White Sox
Heather Williams is wild about sports. She’s the goalie on a local men’s hockey team, watches ESPN’s “SportsCenter” religiously and regularly reads Sports Illustrated.
So when it came time to design a line of clothing for a fashion show as part of her senior project at the Rhode Island School of Design, Williams drew upon her love of sports and America’s passion for its national pastime: baseball.
“It’s the all-American sport,” said Williams, a fraying, blue Abercrombie & Fitch baseball cap slung low over her forehead. “I mean, who doesn’t understand baseball?”
Her first baseball outfit is a literal interpretation: The skirt looks like a flattened baseball, with its arching red seams superimposed on tan leather.
The top is a furious mesh of red, white and yellow string that resembles the coiled stitching of the inside of a baseball. It was inspired by her golden retriever, Dudley, who tore apart baseballs at an alarming rate at Williams’ childhood home in Summit, N.J.
The jacket is chocolate-brown leather, padded with cotton quilting fabric along the front and embroidered to mimic a catcher’s vest. A dark brown leather belt is thrown in for effect.
The second outfit is more subtle. There’s a backless cream-colored top and dark brown leather pants padded at the knees.
“Though it’s really avant-garde fashion, it’s translated very well,” said Lorraine Howls, an apparel design professor who until last year had directed the school’s biannual fashion show since 1976. “That’s because they’re very functional, wearable clothes. It moves with the body, with a lot of color and ways you can apply the color.”
Williams, 21, who graduated this year with a degree in apparel design, pulled several all-nighters in the 10 weeks it took to piece together her two outfits.
She sketched, bought the fabrics and manufactured the garments. It took two days with a hammer and nail just to punch the holes in the leather hide through which to thread the red stitching.
The marriage of sports and clothing is as old as American fashion itself.
In the 1920s, American women flooded the workforce and had less time to fuss with dressmakers, said Madelyn Shaw, associate curator in the costume and textile department at the RISD Museum of Art. They wanted ready-to-wear clothes, something they could buy right off the rack.
Early American fashion designers chose athletics, Shaw said, because famous American females were swashbuckling sorts, like the aviator Amelia Earhart or Olympic gold medalist and golfer Babe Didrikson Zaharias.
The look was simple dresses that hung almost straight from the shoulder that Shaw describes as “an almost boyish silhouette.”
And baseball is a natural fit for that look.
Famous designers such as Halston and Yoji Yamamoto have dabbled in uniform-inspired clothes, and Calvin Klein trotted out a line in 1985 based on baseball jerseys.
Williams “is continuing a long American tradition of looking at American culture to produce something that reflects the American lifestyle,” Shaw said.
Baseball is hardly Williams’ favorite sport. Sure, she went to some Chicago Cub games at Wrigley Field before her family moved when she was 12, but the game itself bores her.
Her collection is a reflection of her personality, a marriage of sports and art, she said.
Crystal White, a 1997 RISD graduate who was one of the fashion show’s judges, said it was obvious what Williams was trying to do.
“You could be so profound, tell a story and be totally out there and creative, and she picked something simple and created a design around that theme,” said White, who works for retailer American Eagle. “It was something so simple that was amazingly creative at the end.”
However, Valerie Steele, acting director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, who hasn’t seen Williams’ collection, still fears that it might be too gimmicky. And, she added, basketball, snowboarding and soccer are trendier sports at the moment.
Baseball is “not a high fashion sport,” Steele said.
