Every garment tells a tale, but New York-based textile historian and designer Sarah Jean Culbreth listens more closely than most to what clothing has to say. “Learning the backstory of a piece makes me appreciate it so much more,” she says. “I think that’s what makes it an art form and a true craft.” She was first introduced to clothing history dress while completing a degree in Apparel Design and was instantly pulled in by an invisible, propulsive thread. “I had to write a paper on the history of sleeves, and I just remember thinking, ‘There’s a history of sleeves?’ That was wild to me.”
Textiles have always been an important part of Sarah Jean’s life. “As a young teenager, I couldn’t find what I wanted to wear at the mall or local stores,” Sarah Jean recalls. “So we would buy things from thrift stores or charity stores and then my mom would help me alter them.” An understanding of clothing construction grew, guiding her through university and proving pivotal in her first job as an intern at the Costume Institute in New York. There, her affinity for historical dress flourished. “I remember feeling like this is where I've always wanted to end up. Seeing old, beautiful clothing every day was incredibly inspiring,” she reflects. “I realised that it was something I could be happy doing for the rest of my life.”
After spending the best part of a decade working in Manhattan’s world-renowned museums, the pandemic and the arrival of her first child prompted Sarah Jean to relocate to Rockaway Beach, Queens. “Museums were suffering, and I didn’t see it as a sustainable way of making a living, so I started sewing more and more.” Her designs were inspired by the historical clothing she had crossed paths with, particularly bloomers, dresses and robes from the 1700s. “I began making my own versions of things. And people were starting to notice and stopping me on the street, asking, ‘Where did you get that?’”
References to 18th-century dress appear in the repurposed capsule collection Sarah Jean has designed for TOAST. “I can't make fashion without thinking about it from a historical standpoint,” she says. Using fabric off-cuts and returned or damaged TOAST items, she has created 13 unique pieces informed by centuries-old clothes, taking steps to minimise waste wherever possible. “I’m always thinking about saving textiles, so this project scratched an itch for me.” Utilising patchworking across the collection to highlight the diversity of the textiles – from block-printed cotton to striped fabrics – Sarah Jean has given new life to remnants which would ordinarily be disposed of.
The designer’s core aesthetic is voluminous and sweeping, with hand-sewn quilting bringing unique texture to her garments. Growing up in the South, she was taught about local patchworking and quilting traditions and their heritage in American craft. Her mother is still a part of a Quilter’s Guild in Tennessee, and Sarah Jean enlisted the help of one of its members when making a quilted jacket for TOAST. “I was visiting my mom and I brought all this fabric to this woman’s house,” she laughs. “We decided on a beautiful motif of trailing vines, and we used her long-arm quilting machine to achieve it.” This collaborative effort is an important chapter of the finished product’s story, bookended by long days in a dedicated room in Sarah Jean’s home, where she created the rest of the collection from start to finish.
“One of the dresses I made is based on a style born in 1830s Europe and America, characterised by these really big, leg-of-mutton sleeves.” The Industrial Revolution is to credit for the emergence of this silhouette, as fabric was suddenly able to be produced in greater quantities, for a lower price. Sarah Jean’s reimagining uses linen from other TOAST dresses, patchworked to form a contemporary take on the nineteenth-century dress, with a lower waistband better suited to non-corseted bodies.
Another piece, an open jacket cut into a loose T-shape, is inspired by eighteenth-century bed gowns imported to the West from Asia and worn around the house by the upper classes. “It's called ‘conspicuous leisure’: this idea that if you wore a leisure garment, that meant that you were a leisurely person,” Sarah Jean explains. “That silhouette is so beautiful to me because it tells this huge story.” Iterations of the shape continue to crop up almost two centuries later – Sarah Jean references major Italian fashion houses that released versions in the ’80s and ’90s. “It’s kept appearing throughout time, and now it's become timeless.”
Sarah Jean’s methods echo how clothing was preserved in the periods she researches, when items were continuously handed down and adjusted to fit younger and smaller family members. But on a technical level, the approach is different. “For the TOAST collection, I was taking apart two or three things, and those two or three things would become one garment. And so it's kind of the opposite of how things were done historically.” Fabric was expensive, and the labour involved in designing, pattern-cutting and assembling each article was time-consuming. The average person couldn't afford to throw away a dress because of a tear or stain, so the only option was to work with what they had. “We talk about investment pieces now, but back then, it was truly an investment.”
Not only is this attitude kinder to the environment, but it’s also practical. “Clothing of the past is easily dismissed as old-fashioned, but there were moments in history when what people wore was more modern than what we're wearing now,” she observes, explaining how items were designed to adapt to the different phases of life; weight fluctuation or pregnancy, for example. In today’s trend-led fashion climate, such forethought is a rarity. “We’re so frivolous with our clothes,” Sarah Jean says. “But I think it is so much more beautiful and exciting to wear something you love and feel passionate about and make it work for you throughout your life.”
Shop our collaboration with Sarah Jean exclusively at our Brooklyn shop from Sun 1 September.
Join Sarah Jean for a patchworking workshop using remnant TOAST and Sarah Jeans fabrics on Thur 5 September.
Visit our Brooklyn shop as we celebrate New York Textile Month with a TOAST Circle Pop-Up from Sun 1 to Sun 29 September. The pop-up will explore circular techniques through the lens of sustainability, culture, wellbeing and storytelling.
Words by Bébhinn Campbell.
Photography by Sam Fleischner.
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