Knit One, Sell Two
When Kate O’Connor loaded up her pickup truck and headed cross country for California two years ago, she never dreamed she would have a line of knitwear on sale at the crossroads of L.A. style: Ron Herman on Melrose Avenue. Or that her handmade ponchos, shawls, apron-tops and dresses, almost painterly in their color combinations, would be selling out in a matter of hours to celebs like Sheryl Crow, Cameron Diaz and Kelly Osbourne.
“Are you kidding?” the fresh-faced 27-year-old says, surrounded by multicolored spools of silk, mohair and alpaca thread at her Los Angeles studio. “I was intimidated even to go into the parking lot of Ron Herman.”
O’Connor’s sexy, one-of-a-kind pieces are selling elsewhere too--Pearl in Santa Monica and Henri Bendel in New York--thanks to the Boho chic trend storming the streets.
Barefoot and dressed in a floor-skimming bluejean skirt emblazoned with the words “I dig your sexy tractor” and an off-the-shoulder black sweater, the designer is a country girl at heart. She grew up on a farm in Lowville, N.Y., the daughter of a large-animal veterinarian.
After high school, she went to the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where she used miles of thread in her installation-based performance art pieces. She began to apply her skills to wearable art. After her work became a hit at the Telluride AIDS Benefit fashion show in Colorado, O’Connor decided she was ready for the big time.
Her first gig in L.A. was knitting hats for the Anna Sui store on Sunset Boulevard. Longing to do bigger projects, last year she contacted the local branch of the Knitting Guild in hopes of finding someone who could teach her to use a knitting machine to create fabric. That person was Joyce Oliver, a retired computer programmer who lives in South-Central L.A. and runs a private knitting business.
“I taught her how to use a knitting machine, and she went crazy with it,” Oliver says.
“We would sit around and listen to [neo-soul songstress] Jill Scott,” O’Connor recalls of her training at Oliver’s house. “Her stuff is the bomb” she says of her teacher’s designs.
O’Connor had her own knitting machine--a flea-market find she was never able to use--shipped out from Baltimore, where it had been in storage for more than a year. Then, in her matchbox-sized apartment on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, she began spinning her dream.
The closet was the only place where the machine would fit, so it was there that she worked late into the night. “My neighbors must have thought I was an obsessive exerciser because of all the noise the machine made,” she says.
In November, a couple of stylist friends convinced her to take some of her creations to the Ron Herman store, where local designers often go for a kind of fashion audition. There, like so many others, she was “discovered” by buyer John Eshaya, who walked by when a saleswoman was trying on a top.
Eshaya bought 20 pieces on the spot, and by 2 p.m. the next day they were sold out. “They are so individual and special,” he says. “And they are hippie without being too hippie.”
O’Connor’s lightweight knitwear is not cheap: Ponchos are $275, asymmetrical wrap tops run about $365 and custom gowns can be as much as $3,000. But each garment is handmade (it takes her about six hours to make a poncho).
Part of the appeal of O’Connor’s work may be that she has no formal training. “The patterns, striping and fringe are imperfect,” she says, throwing a handful of Polaroids down on the studio’s hardwood floor to illustrate her point. “I don’t know much about the fashion industry, so my biggest influence is color, and then I figure out how it will fit the body.”
For fall, she’ll debut a small line of about 1,200 pieces that will be distributed to other stores. Now that her dream is coming true, O’Connor finds it hard to believe. “Every day it’s becoming more real,” she says. “In L.A., it’s amazing how you get that one piece of exposure and doors open for you.”
