A certain amount of craftiness is built into the impish brand Lou Dallas’s DNA. New York–based designer Raffaella Hanley works primarily with deadstock fabrics, often hand-sewing together delicate, whimsical garments that look like grungy approximations of fairy-tale garb. There’s a handmade feel down to the dyes Hanley uses; she’ll often color her creations with pigments made from turmeric and other natural materials. Her mother originally taught Hanley how to wield a needle and thread when she was in the fourth grade—her mother had her own children’s fashion line at that time. “She made me and all my friends velvet bell-bottoms,” Hanley said.
While in self-isolation in her New York City apartment, Hanley has been getting back into her crafts roots. Now that she has an abundance of free time, she’s been making seven-layer Italian cookies, hand-sewing sweaters that she had originally planned on getting factory-made, and making masks that have the very same homespun charm as her official Lou Dallas designs.
But she’s also had time to flip through crafting books (that she stole from her mother) as inspiration for new projects, like the one that she’s now sharing with Vogue: Hanley shows her process for using patchwork, embroidery, and sequins to transform an old pair of jeans.First, she searched for inspiration from photo books, like street style images from the late Bill Cunningham. Then, Hanley chose a pair of blue jean shorts as her canvas and chose some other pieces of clothing to serve as patchwork fabric. (“Everyone gives me their clothes that they don’t know what to do with anymore, and it’s honestly driving me nuts,” Hanley said, an unexpected outcome of being associated with upcycling.)
Then she chose the stencil for her patchwork fabric from some quilting books she had lying around. “I’m a Pisces, so I found a silhouette of two fish, but I think they look more like sharks,” Hanley said. If you don’t have any more formal materials at home, though, she suggests making your own stencils by searching online. “You can just Google black silhouettes of objects and print it out on your printer,” Hanley said, whether it be the shape of an animal or a flower. The only guideline is to keep the shape relatively simple.
Next choose the placement—a key step. Once you have your homespun stencil ready, Hanley recommends pinning down the two different fabrics and trying it on to see how it looks. “You can just lay it down and place it, but I think it’s better to put it on before you go for it, because you’re inevitably going to want to change something,” she said.
Once it’s all set, start sewing. After stitching floral fabric in the shape of two little sharklike fish onto her jean shorts, Hanley went over the outline with embroidery floss. She created some freestyle flowers with the thread too. “Embroidery floss is great because you can add more detail that way and you have more color choices,” she said. As a final flourish, Hanley sewed in some sequins.
For Hanley, the process of embarking on a simple patchwork project tapped into the same youthful spirit she’s been tapping into during social distancing and documenting on her Instagram. She’s been covering her face in temporary tattoos and dressing up as different alter egos, like the fishnet-wearing housewife who styles her apron-dress backward. “I was honestly really happy [with the final product]—I found it to be very fun,” Hanley said of the process of making her sequin-covered shark patches. “I was really happy, because these shorts were so boring before. It’s been fun to just spend time being kind of silly.”
