I felt lightheaded last Thursday at the Wicker Park boutique Hejfina, and it wasn’t from the Sofia Mini–champagne in a can–I was sipping through its attached pink bendy straw. What got me giddy was the rack of new clothes unveiled for Jasmin Shokrian’s trunk show.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Shokrian is pretty tight-lipped herself about certain things. We’ve been acquaintances for some time, bumping into each other at art shows and parties, yet she’s always been guarded about her personal life and her family. “Image-wise I’ve been really specific about how I’m perceived,” she says. She does volunteer that her mother, an “expert tailor” with a “very couture hand” who made Shokrian’s clothes when she was a kid, has helped her make patterns for each of her six collections over the past three years.
At the Art Institute in the late 90s Shokrian and some friends–a sculptor, a painter, a filmmaker, and a writer–met in her studio and made clothing together, not to sell or show but just to wear themselves.
Last year “I wanted to go another step and involve people I didn’t know,” she says. Through a personal ad in the LA Weekly and a bulletin on Friendster she encouraged people to leave anonymous messages “inspired by chance happenings” on a voice-mail line. A couple months later, she dumped her “enormous compilation” into a sound program on her Mac and printed out the waveforms in large scale. From there she devised patterns for tops, skirts, and dresses, using the lines to determine cuts and seams. “I liked that part of what these people were saying would end up in a shoulder seam,” she says. “I loved that idea that something they were saying was in the clothes, like a secret the wearer carries on themselves.”
In the end, the audience favorites overlapped with the scholarship winners in only one case: Iris Bainum-Houle, who showed three fairy-tale-inspired looks that incorporated capes, preserved rose petals, and a freaky feather mask. The clothes were at once dramatic and juvenile, like a child’s temper tantrum. The stuff made by the rest of the winners was far more restrained: Sophie Lennox-King’s delicately hand-tattered dress, a leather jacket whose hood was lined by Melissa Serpico with intricate raised stitching, Matthew Lanci’s wool coat decorated with drops of resin. When clothing is this subtle, you need to get close to appreciate it. That’s what Shokrian seems to know. It’s intimate, like a secret.
