Folk fashion featured at National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library reopening

Photos, story, video by Cliff Jette/The Gazette

To Sonya Darrow, fashion and art are inseparable.

The thrift artist-in-residence at Goodwill of the Heartland who works under the name LADYFITS has created modern interpretations of traditional Czech folk costumes.   Her work will be featured with a lecture, films and question-and-answer session on Saturday as part of the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library's reopening festivities.

What you need to know

• What: “Resourceful Expressions through Folk Dress” by Sonya Darrow
• When: Noon Saturday
• Where: National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library, Cedar Rapids
• Details: Darrow will discuss the influences of Cedar Rapids' Czech and Slovak heritage and her own cultural identity on her designs along with showing films of her process in creating the clothes followed by a question and answer session.
•  Extra: Following the lecture Darrow will have an open studio at P.J.'s Czech Shop, 76 16th Ave. SW, and her interpretations of Czech and Slovak folk clothes will be on display Saturday and Sunday in an installation in storefronts along 16th Avenue.

“The Czech and Slovak culture really inspires a lot of what I do with textiles and with my personal style and with my mindset of sustainability. I think the Czechs and Slovaks with their folk art always believed in taking something that might be falling apart (and) making it beautiful again,” she says.

After the Floods of 2008 Darrow started collecting books on folk dress and used the New York Public library and Fashion Institute of Technology for her research.

"It has been a long process of trying to understand not just how to make these amazing folk dresses, but to understand the why - to bring my own ideas of the folk dress as a form of personal style or identity."

Her work will be on display throughout the Czech Village. But these aren't just museum pieces. She wears elements of each outfit - many of which come from area Goodwill stores - on an everyday basis.

“A lot of the materials I use were donated to me by people who have Czech backgrounds or are from the Czech Village area,” she says.

Thrift stores also are a source of inspiration.

“I see a doily on the table and I instantly think of a May Day headdress,” she says.

For example, Darrow's take on the traditional kroj speaks to the importance of the home and the kitchen to Czech and Slovak culture. Portions of old krojs from Czech Village Antiques along with former curtains were combined with dish towels.

The skirt of "Babi's Towels," as she has named the outfit, is made of a collection dish towels from other people's Babis.

"(The towels) have all the motifs that I grew up connecting to Czech culture and it kind of has a warm feeling, the fact it is made of towels bring in that home experience."

Darrow describes the outfit as a walking oral history piece. When she wears the towel skirt she enjoys recounting the stories of the Babis shared with her by those who donated them. The kroj is completed with a headdress utilizing doilies, Christmas ornaments and reed material discovered at Goodwill stores.

Using everyday materials, like old dish towels, is a theme throughout her folk dress exhibition.

"I have had a kind of obsession with using mops over the past year, from adornments or breaking it down completely and doing more of a woven structure with it".

In another piece that echoes the importance of the home, she created a skirt from the mop itself with out altering the raw material.

“I like to take things you just wouldn't expect putting on yourself or connect even to a folk dress,” says Darrow.

For one outfit, Darrow was inspired not by authentic folk clothes but by an immigrants dreams of America.

"I wanted to pay homage not only to the saddle shop in the Avenue, because I think a lot of people connect to that saddle shop and miss it, but also to how immigrants looked at America and thought of the cowboy."

The 1964 Czechoslovak satire of the American westerns,"Lemonade Joe" provided her inspiration for this dress along with a man she calls her muse. Peter Vodenka, a Czechoslavak immigrant who settled in North Dakota and now lives in Minnesota, who moved to southern Bohemia so he could own a horse and set his watch to Eastern Standard Time rather than local time in Czechoslovakia before he emigrated. Darrow learned of his story through the NCSML's oral history project.

"He wanted to be an American cowboy and I just loved that whole dream of his of one day being in America," she says.

Sonya's folk inspired outfits are not just about the past. They are also cognizant of the future. Many details on these dresses and elements such as zippers were used in previous designs and many will live on in a future project. Darrow says she goes to the extreme to not damage a garment so she can donate it back to Goodwill for someone else to use. She will use oragami-like folds to protect the material.

"When I design, a lot of times I have the idea to always think of the future of it. Instead of just thinking of what I am going to do with it now I always think to the next steps of that textile's life."