ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

Curated Fashion Brand Profile: Prairie Underground

 

Welcome to the start of a new mini-series on the blog, highlighting the oeuvre of awesome outside fashion and accessories lines that Art In The Age has selected to carry in the store and on the web! All of the curated brands share crucial values with us, such as eco-friendliness and the idea of clothing as more than an object, but as a blank canvas. Our first profile features Prairie Underground, a women’s fashion line, owned and operated by Camilla Eckersley and Davora Lindner out of Seattle, Washington.

Prairie Underground brings us the fabulously arrayed Mothette Dress…

The fitted and feminine Moto Hoodie…

And the incredibly comfortable and versatile Long Cloak Hoodie…

Company/Brand Essence Statement:

Camilla Eckersley and Davora Lindner (co-designers and founders of Prairie Underground) became friends in high school in the 80′s.  As teenagers in the Midwest, they were transfixed by the New Romantic music movement in London and the 80’s East Village art scene in New York, and were a part of a community of like-minded kids interested in experimental fashion, music, art and politics.  This time and place is the inspiration behind Prairie Underground and the collection is created in homage to iconoclastic women everywhere who remain independent in spirit.

Pick 3 words to describe your brand/line:

Populist, Utilitarian, Rustic

How the brand began:

We relocated to Seattle in the summer of 2004 to launch Prairie Underground, leaving behind successful careers in San Francisco and Minneapolis to pursue a childhood dream of creating our own collection.  Camilla was working as a designer at Rebecca Beeson and Davora was working independently creating and exhibiting sculpture.  Our first strategy meetings were held on the bed in Davora’s studio apartment in Seattle’s First Hill.  We never considered the possibility that the line might fail, or that Seattle wouldn’t be the perfect place to produce a clothing line.  Prairie Underground was started with very little investment capital and after fifteen collections remains entirely independent with no outside investors, factoring its own growth, completely off the map of the fashion industry.

Criteria for materials selection:

Eco, Affordable, Unusual, Machine Washable

A challenge that you/the line overcame:

Putting ourselves in the collection, designing the clothes we want to wear.

Favorite part about your job:

Design Meetings, Fittings

Tell us one secret or “little-known-fact” about you or your line.

We answer the phone.

How would YOU wear/pair your product?

With anything by Frye or dancing shoes and vintage leather jackets

What is your response to this passage from “The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Walter Benjamin, 1936), as it relates to your brand story/philosophy?

An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction…leads us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To 
an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.

There is still plenty of mystery and good luck associated with manufacturing apparel.