Individuality is the only trend.

The need to be different silently permeates society as people silently try to make sense of who they are and what they stand for after a year that crumbled their self images.

Four Pepperdine students have answered the call. Their prolific talents have manifested in slashed fabric, inside-out seams, cheap fur and paint. But their inventions reach far deeper than the fashions they create and sell. They have visions, mold images, and with them, invest their raw emotions in each stitch of thread and tear of fabric. Their designs reflect a generation that embraces the beauty of the past and evolves it until it is only theirs.

These four students design clothes. Each designer is different in approach and effect, but their clothes challenge their customers to identify with the fabrics they are wearing and make them their own.

The Cast

When Nick Hartley was three years old, his mother rushed him to the hospital to have his stomach pumped because he ate paint.

His almost magnetic attraction to art carried him through marketing positions at three local fashion companies and gave him the opportunity to be an integral player in a rapidly growing clothing and art company. Hartley, a senior international business major at Pepperdine, is a part owner of The Cast, an alliance of fashion designers, artists, photographers and musicians who strive to incorporate progression and creativity in their clothes.

Hartley initially joined The Cast a year and a half ago to handle the company’s marketing and finances, freeing the other two designers (Ryan Turner, a 1998 Pepperdine graduate, and Chuck Guarino of New Jersey) from the creative hindrances that business sometimes brings.

“You have two artists who can do anything -- graphics and rough canvas art,” Hartley said. “But when you get mixed up in the politics of a company they started losing their edge. So they started the company and then they called me and pitched their ideas. I was like, ‘let‘s do it!’”

He couldn’t stay away from the creative side of the company for long. Soon after Hartley joined The Cast, he began designing graphically and then learned how to sew.

“One day you are stenciling a shirt, and the next thing you know you are adding and adding until the shirt is all cut up and sewn a couple of times,” Hartley said.

The Cast’s designs have evolved from loud graphics on T-shirts to more original designs that employ innovative lines and creative utility. Their latest clothes look like someone let a child cut up some shirts and pants and then a genius sewed them back together in a marriage of practicality and aberration.

The Cast has added a new dimension to the utility that carries clothing lines through fickle trends.

“I think our image says raw,” Hartley said. “We have had some of our stores describe us as a cross between Paul Frank and Diesel, but I think our image is more unconventional than that.”

The company employs other methods to root its culturally rich image. Their website, castcloth.com, includes a newsletter, photo gallery showcasing skewed perspectives from around the world, and a forum for artists and writers to submit their cultural experiences. The Cast sponsors filmmakers, photographers, and musicians, and has a street team of more than 1,000 supporters in the music, fashion and entertainment industries. They also throw fashion, art and photography shows.

“It all stems from us wanting to do our own thing and not have our ideas taken from us for other companies to profit from,” Hartley said. “We like to give artists a medium to express their ideas, and they begin to embody the concept of The Cast.

“I don’t even know what The Cast is sometimes,” Nick continued. “Whether it is artists, photographers, designers...I didn’t think it would develop with such depth so quickly.”

Yet it’s vision and clothing have reached depths as far as the other side of the world. The Cast boosted exposure from being in 3 stores in the winter of 2000 to 30 for spring 2001. The company’s marketing technique could be responsible for landing Cast clothing in high-end boutiques from London to New York and New Jersey to Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Hartley pastes their catalogues onto metal sheets and wooden boards. They write to query letters to potential stores, then cross out words and spray paint over parts of it.

“It is a raw mess,” Hartley said. “It is real and personal, and that’s the thing...its not just some generic send out, and they know that, too.”

The three began the company without investors and sustain sales and creativity as its only employees. Friends help with modeling, and they contract photographers and manufacturers, but the three continue to do most of the sewing themselves.

“We want to grow, but also stay small,” Hartley said. “We don’t want to end up in Macy’s or anything because that is not representative of the styles we create and the things we are into. We won’t forfeit who we are for money. That would be selling out.”

Jessie Abrams’s designs

She is not afraid of being a starving artist. She welcomes the stereotype as openly as the images that flood her mind right before she goes to sleep at night.

“I keep a pad of paper beside my bed because I so much of my designing before I sleep,” said junior Jessie Abrams, who began exploring this new medium of art after she and some friends began throwing paint on clothes last year.

Abrams came to Pepperdine from San Diego three years ago knowing she would spend her time here gaining the classical knowledge general education classes provided while having time to cultivate and explore different artistic paths. She has always wanted to be an artist, and she hasn’t changed her mind.

“I don’t care about an artist’s image,” Abrams said. “I am going to make it as an artist because I believe in it.”

With a small collection of original pieces, Abrams has constructed an image in her clothing that is versatile and attractively unsettling. Her custom made shirts lead the eye through the garments so that almost like a painting, there is a greater point to each one. She sews seams outside old jeans, shirts and dresses, rejuvenating clothes others would discard. She has also incorporated her classical painting training into her designs. She paints directly onto T-shirts with acrylic paints creating multi-dimensional effects where only cotton once was.

“Clothes are art right now, so it is OK if they are not mass produced,” Abrams said. “Each is its own work of art.”

Abrams began designing because she wanted new clothes that no one else had without paying a fortune for them. People began asking her where she got her clothes from, suspecting they came from the shelves of pricey boutiques when in reality, they were clothes from high school that she had cut and re-sewn.

“I’ve been cutting up things since I was in junior high – I am always just taking apart everything,” Abrams said.

But she never begins putting things together with a plan of how they are going to turn out.

“It is so frustrating to just let things happen,” Abrams said. “Art is a conversation between you and the medium – it’s such a compromise.

“Amazing things happen when you cultivate the dynamic. I have never began something knowing how it will really end up because usually something better, or at least different, than what I had in mind ends up happening,” she continued.

Although she is addicted to her new form of creative expression, Abrams is keeping an open mind about where fashion design will take her. She will probably attend grad school, and if there continues to be a demand for her styles, she will pursue fashion while there.

“It has never been for the money,” Abrams said. “It is more like experimenting. I am really excited to see what’s next though. Who knows, maybe I’ll create it.”

July Temper

Stella Benzimra and Megan Hofferth spend most of their free time at the Salvation Army. The two Pepperdine juniors sift through other people’s history in the aisles of thrift stores, looking for a foundation upon which to build a new, modern image.

“Megan goes to the Salvation Army boutique, but I am not that big of a spender, so I stick to the regular part of the store,” Benzimra said, laughing.

The girls’ sarcastic humor and glamorous demeanor scream through the clothes they recreate. Their line’s name, July Temper, is as much a part of their belief in mysticism and creativity as their fashions. Hofferth was born in July, and Benzimra’s astrological sign is Taurus, which is notorious for its temper.

Benzimra, a California native, won an award for being the best dressed in high school, and Hofferth, who is from Illinois, employed fashion as a creative means to being different than the people around her.

The entrepreneurs adorn discarded shirts and pants with a gaudy fervor that somehow works. They paste rhinestones on jeans, tie-dye T-shirts and tie knots all over the sleeves. They use glitter, studs and scissors to recreate a light-hearted, flamboyant style that is now selling in local boutiques like Gizell and Pinnacle’.

Their strong image will be a strong factor in sustaining a customer base.

“If you keep your image strong, and keep focused on who you are catering to, you will be successful,” said Michi Muertigue, the designer for the girls line of Osiris clothing, which caters to surf, skate and snowboarders.

Even if Hofferth and Benzimra don’t know who their customers are, their customers know them.

“The other day, a lady bought the fur off my back,” Hofferth said.

Hofferth and Benzimra’s latest trend is dressing up fur coats they find in thrift store aisles. Some have detailed rhinestone patterns on the back, while others use a few large stones in choice colors to make a bolder statement. They are keeping up with international trends as Glamour magazine’s web site reports fur on all the runways.

The girls started making clothes for themselves two years ago when they were roommates on campus. The two soon had a following of Pepperdine admirers, and they started a company, complete with stitched in garment tags that they write with felt tip markers on discarded fabric. However, considering their growing popularity and success (their jackets retail for more than $450 and T-shirts for roughly $70), they have maintained a balanced perspective.

“We try to take it one day at a time,” Benzimra said. “Right now it is more like a hobby than a career, but it makes people happy to wear our clothes. After college, if this is still going, our parents would help us fund a more serious business. Right now it is just fun.”

Fun or not, all of these designers have the potential to sustain the fickle trends of today’s fashionably conscious. They are at the cusp of those trends—trends that let those who wear their fabrics find their individualities through the seams and fur of the clothes these designers create.

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